A semantic ecosystem evolves

VIDAL Group has deployed a new ontology management system to handle and link taxonomies used to provide patients and providers with information for therapeutic decision-making. The European healthcare informatics and information systems company has chosen TopQuadrant’s TopBraid Enterprise Vocabulary Net (EVN) solution. VIDAL Group will use EVN to support the data access needs of physicians, pharmacists and patients wanting timely information about medications and their uses.

Jean-Francois Forget, MD, VIDAL’s chief medical officer, says, “Our overarching goal is to provide user-relevant information in a format that facilitates informed, efficient, effective and economically sensible therapeutic decision-making. This requires that we execute a number of information sorting, layering, translation and linking tasks. In particular, it is very important that we are able to organize information from a number of perspectives and a variety of information granularities depending on a user’s specific request.”

The chief medical officer continues, “Our decision to redesign our information processing infrastructure into one centered around semantic technologies is based on our belief that those technologies provide us with the theoretical framework to address our users’ needs with a degree of flexibility never before possible. We chose TopQuadrant because its tools enable us to transform theory into practice and to turn complex information processing ideas into products that benefit our customers. TopQuadrant tools are, in fact, enabling us to build a semantic ecosystem in our domain of expertise.”

VIDAL is using Enterprise Vocabulary Net to improve the internal management, search navigation and semantic linking of a number of enterprise terminologies, a step that is increasing both internal consistency and efficiency as well as external reuse and enhanced delivery, TopBraid reports.

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