An Ontology Supported Meta-interface for the Development and Installation of Customized Web Based Telemedicine Systems

The novel and generic meta-interface (MI) paradigm proposed in this paper automates the generation of customized telemedicine software systems (CTSS), directly from the customized application interface (CAI) specifications given. The MI paradigm was tested and verified in the TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) telemedicine environment of Nong’s Company Limited of the PuraPharm Group, a local Hong Kong TCM telemedicine developer that funded this research. The CAI specification is made by “gluing” together icons selected from the enterprise icon library (IL). The CTSS generation, in effect, extracts the corresponding portion of the subsumption hierarchy from the master ontology, an enterprise standard. Since CTSS prototypes were verified in the Nong’s TCM telemedicine environment, they were built with the Nong’s master TCM ontology core (onto-core) as the basis and reference. In this light, the ontological extraction for a CAI specification is turned into the local TCM onto-core for the CTSS prototype. The enterprise TCM onto-core, the local TCM onto-core, and the icons in IL all contain formal knowledge derived from the enterprise TCM vocabulary. In Nong’s case the enterprise vocabulary is the standard of CTSS terminology, gathered from TCM classics, treatises, and case histories by domain experts with consensus certification. Using CAI as the single input to automate the whole CTSS generation process would eliminate MSPM (multi-site project management) problems. Since the Nong’s MC (mobile clinics) based telemedicine system is web-based and pervasive, the CTSS is also referred to as the Nong’s web-based telemedicine systems (WTS).