Evolving Health Informatics Semantic Frameworks and Metadata-Driven Architectures

Advances in technology allow us to communicate large amounts of information, almost instantaneously, between any two points on the globe. Advances in analysis and imaging techniques, and progress in genomic, proteomic, and metabonomic science, allow us to obtain detailed information about the health of an individual. Advances in the computerisation of social and business infrastructure allow us to obtain similarly detailed information about other aspects of our lives. The automatic integration of this data, based upon a computable representation of its meaning or semantics, will revolutionise both medical and clinical research, and the impact on healthcare delivery will be dramatic. Not merely in terms of personalised medicine, informed by the new biology, but also in the very nature of national and international healthcare systems. In this position paper, we briefly explore two problem domains, explain the importance of semantic frameworks and the software engineering opportunities that they present, and discuss current progress in two linked initiatives.