From Internet and the semantic web towards community health care and cancer research

1. From Internet and the semantic web towards community health care and cancer research INCTR 2004

2. Internet WWW Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Table of content • Internet (2) • WWW • Decision support • Workflow orchestration • Community healthcare • Cancer research INCTR 2004

3. Started by the US Department of Defense (DarpaNet) in 1974 Built on top of this technology, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailleau, working at CERN, invented the WWW as an in house network for a telephone repository. Is currently a huge network of computers sharing billions of documents. Internet WWW Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Internet INCTR 2004

4. Today’s internet Millions of users Web, email, low-quality audio & video Interconnect personal computers and servers Applications adapt to underlying technology Tomorrow’s internet 2 Billions of users and devices Convergence of today’s applications with multimedia (telephony, video-conference, HDTV) Interconnect personal computers, servers, and embedded computers New technologies enable unanticipated applications (and create new challenges) Internet WWW Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Internet 2 INCTR 2004

5. Internet 2 means More Better Faster Internet 2 will be an enabler of new technologies It will boost the usage of the WWW Internet WWW Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Internet 2 INCTR 2004

6. Internet WWW Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Universal Access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust WWW INCTR 2004

7. Universal Access The WWW is the universe of network-accessible information (available through your computer, phone, television, or networked refrigerator...). This enables new forms of human communication and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research WWW INCTR 2004

8. Interoperability: Twenty years ago, people bought software that only worked with other software from the same vendor. Today, people have more freedom to choose, and they rightly expect software components to be interchangeable. They also expect to be able to view Web content with their preferred software (graphical desktop browser, speech synthesizer, braille display, car phone...). W3C, a vendor-neutral organization, promotes interoperability by designing and promoting open (non-proprietary) computer languages and protocols that avoid the market fragmentation of the past. Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research WWW INCTR 2004

9. Decentralization: Decentralization is a principle of modern distributed systems, including societies. In a centralized system, every message or action has to pass through a central authority, causing bottlenecks when the traffic increases. In design, we therefore limit the number of central Web facilities to reduce the vulnerability of the Web as a whole. It works like a holographic system: you cut out part of the system, but the system keeps working, because other parts can take over. Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research WWW INCTR 2004

10. Semantic Web: People currently share their knowledge on the Web in languages intended for other people. This is okay for humans but difficult for machines! They cannot really help us; they only play the role of a messenger between two humans. This is about the ‘meaning’ of the data. For machines a typical web page looks like this: Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research WWW INCTR 2004

11. Semantic Web: This is not about humans understanding computers, but computers understanding humans. On the Semantic Web we will be able to express ourselves in terms that our computers can interpret and exchange. By doing so, we will enable them to solve problems that we find tedious, too slow or even impossible to do. It will enable computers to behave in an intelligent way Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research WWW INCTR 2004

12. Semantic Web: Each Item on the web is called a resource In the semantic web a resource should have information about itself, called “metadata” The “semantic web” is a metadata based infrastructure allowing machines to do reasoning on data Using URI’s you can uniquely and universally identify resources on the web Uniqueness is vital to make consistent statements Anybody can create metadata on any resource on the web democratic principle problem of trust It becomes easy to merge metadata Applications can merge information coming from different sources Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research WWW INCTR 2004

13. Semantic Web: ontologies Ontologies are a description of a domain using concepts and relations between concepts. This is where ‘information’ becomes ‘knowledge’. ‘Intelligence’ comes from latin: ‘inter’ + ‘legere’ meaning ‘making connections between’ Ontologies can be merged and interconnected, forming a gigantic source of medical knowledge. We need the standards of the Semantic web to build ontologies RDF, OWL, resources (URI’s) Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research WWW INCTR 2004

14. Trust: Trust for people: to promote a more collaborative environment, we must build a "Web of Trust" that offers confidentiality, instills confidence, and makes it possible for people to take responsibility for (or be accountable for) what they publish on the Web. Trust for machines: software, doing ‘intelligent’ processing of data (e.g. decision support in medicine) must be able to prove it is thrustworthy. Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research WWW INCTR 2004

15. Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research WWW INCTR 2004

16. Given the ontologies, the rules, the proofs and the trust we have all means in hand to help people decide. Using clinical data from patients, knowledge from ontologies and rules (guidelines, best practices, …), systems can propose diagnoses and generate treatment plans (clinical pathways). Clinical data from patients can come from different sources: different EPR databases, measurements from devices, … Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Decision support INCTR 2004

17. Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Decision support INCTR 2004

18. Not only can systems help us decide, they can also help us organize the work by forwarding a generated treatment or care plan to a workflow engine to orchestrate all steps in the plan. During execution of the steps, either by humans, either by machines, new data is generated. Using the semantic technology the new data and changed evidence or guidelines are input for a next cycle, enabling an adaptable process, tailored to the individual needs of the patient and the changing environment Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Workflow orchestration INCTR 2004

19. Internet WWW Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Workflow orchestration INCTR 2004

20. Scaling from one enterprise to the community is intrinsically possible because of the semantic web technology: You can merge different data sources and ontologies Web Services are a technique for interchanging functionality and data between different organizations. There is a semantic preservation. Scaling out workflow can improve quality and cost of healthcare Using of shared resources (machines, equipment) More efficient Internet Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Community health care INCTR 2004

21. How van cancer research profit from this ? Community health care provides the research organizations with huge data sources Data from different sources can be correlated in a way that was not possible before New facts, not apparent at first sight can be inferred Semantic technology can help select patients based on inclusion and exclusion criteria (faster enrollment, fewer drop outs) Monitoring systems can collect data, interpreted by intelligent processes to raise adverse event notifications Semantic technology can bring us more accurate measurements and conclusions (e.g. interpretation of images) Research can give us new evidence which can be incorporated into the ontologies and rules. Like clinical pathways can optimize the clinical work, scientific pathways can optimize research, reducing costs and enhacing the quality. Internet Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Cancer research INCTR 2004

22. Internet Universal access Interoperability Decentralization Semantic Web Trust Decision support Workflow orchestration Community healthcare Cancer research Internet is used by WWW With the WWW you can build a stack from non machine readable documents over machine readable documents (using RDF), ontologies (using OWL), rules, proofs and trust. Scaled out this enables community healthcare Community healthcare enables efficient research with a mutual fertilizing relation. Cancer research internet www RDF doc’s OWL ontologies proof trust community research INCTR 2004