First Steps towards an Intelligent Catalogue within the Open European Nephrology Science Center OpEN.SC

The amount and heterogeneity of data in biomedical research, notably in interdisciplinary fields, requires new methods for the collection, presentation and analysis of information. Important data from laboratory experiments as well as patient trials are available but come out of distributed resources. The Charite - University Hospital Berlin has established together with the German Research Foundation (DFG) a new information service centre for kidney diseases and transplantation (Open European Nephrology Science Centre - OpEN.SC). Beside a collaborative aspect to create new research groups every single partner or institution of this science information centre making his own data available is allowed to search the whole data pool of the various involved centres. For an efficient retrieval we develop an intelligent catalogue using principles of knowledge management techniques coming from case based reasoning. The complete system is based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with main and auxiliary modules arranged in four layers. Here we introduce a first case study with data coming from the Web-based electronic patient record TBase^copy. The paper is organized as follows: After giving an introduction about the situation of available medical data in nephrology and pathology we introduce the environment of the whole system and come then to our first experiments with a case-based reasoning method.