Towards a National Health Knowledge Infrastructure (NHKI): The role of Semantics-based Knowledge Management

The healthcare system in the US is facing crucial challenges in delivering effective, efficient and high quality healthcare. These challenges are in part due to the volume of knowledge and information and their fragmentation across paper and heterogeneous clinical information systems. For instance, biomedical literature doubles every 19 years. AIDS literature in particular doubles every 22 months. A clinician needs approximately 2 million facts to practice. On the other hand, biomedical research has been transformed from a cottage industry, marked by scarce, expensive data generated manually, to a large-scale data-rich industry, marked by factory-scale sequencing. Biology is fast becoming an information-based science with information and knowledge playing a critical role in the flow of research both within biology and into clinical research and practice.