Powering Interoperability in Lab Informatics with the Semantic Web
Taxonomies and ontologies are important methods for organizing and describing lab data. But what if you want to share your lab’s data externally? You might need to communicate a patient’s test results with a hospital’s electronic health record (EHR) system, submit data to a regulatory authority, or publish findings linked to public research databases. To accomplish these tasks efficiently, you need Semantic Web standards and technologies.
The Semantic Web is a framework and associated technologies designed to make data not only machine-readable but also machine-understandable. While taxonomies are valuable for hierarchical classification, and ontologies can model complex relationships between data, the Semantic Web takes structured data a step further, supporting interoperability between systems and outside the lab.
