A Framework for Medical Information Integration Based on Ontology and Web Services

With the rapid development of computer technologies and medical industries, the sharing and exchanging of medical information has become increasingly important. A framework for integrating heterogeneous, diverse and various medical information systems based on Health Level 7(HL7), ontology and Web services is proposed in this paper. In the paper, we describe the framework architecture, module function, and introduce its features and key technologies. The framework has overcome the limits of the traditional cross-platform data sharing technology and information integration. And it exploits ontology based on the domain knowledge exposed by the healthcare information standard - HL7 to solve the problem of semantic heterogeneity of medical information systems and to achieve knowledge reuse, and uses Web services technology to achieve functional reusability.