OHIO Project Semantic Web Benefits

NIC Linked Data The OHIO (Open Health Innovation Ontology) Project Michael Wilkinson NIC Executive Summary The emergence of the semantic web provides a significant opportunity to improve the speed and quality of decision-making in the area of health technology innovations. This Business Case documents how the NIC will continue to develop its semantic web capability in order to deliver significant benefits to key stakeholder groups. This document starts with a detailed analysis of the current market conditions. It then outlines NIC progress to date as well as projected deliverables for June and October. This document then considers potential benefits to the NHS, and the approach to evaluation as a function of ongoing improvement. This document also presents a risk analysis, including a discussion on how such risk will be mitigated – thus ensuring that the potential benefits are likely to be realized. The projected benefits arising from this investment, which will be measured, are expected to exceed the cost of this initial investment by a significant margin. The NIC Linked Data Initiative will contribute to a number of key deliverables that the DH is expecting from the NIC, including contribution to improved: ,[object Object]

support for healthcare industries,

joined-up working with other government departments.2. Market Analysis The NIC is in a prime position to take the leading role in delivering compelling semantically-enhanced applications to deliver value in the health innovation space. The challenge for the NIC is to assure delivery and real benefits in a timely fashion. This paper describes, at a high level, the business case. ,[object Object]

Emerging Opportunities in Healthcare

Next Steps for the NIC, with specified time frame, and cost

The NIC Website (www.nic.nhs.uk)The Opportunity The CBI (Feb, 2010) recently reported that the ‘NHS is data rich and information poor’, and noted that there is a pressing need to improve access to high-quality, utilisation-focused information in order to improve efficiency, effectiveness and quality in the NHS The data-rich, information-poor challenge is not restricted to the NHS. As reported by The Economist (Feb, 2010), the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well – and this is a pressing challenge - data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account. Governments around the world are freeing-up data to promote open innovation and open government. The US has taken the lead in increasing public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government through the creation of www.data.gov, which provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available. It has also invited people to actively participate in shaping the future of data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of Federal data. This gives people a single place to go for all anonymous Government datasets to make it easier to reuse and innovate with Government data. Informed from the US experience, the British Government recently launched data.gov.uk. This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data in a way that is easy to find, license and re-use by publishing data as RDF. Within months of its launch, the site contains nearly 3,000 freely available datasets from across government, 364 of which are from the Department of Health. Making sense of all this data Information has become super-abundant. With so much information on the internet already, access to quality, context-specific information delivered to people when, where and how they want it is a challenge for all sectors. To meet this challenge, the business of information management has steadily grown in recent years. Estimated to be worth more than $100 billion now, this sector is growing at almost 10% a year, roughly twice as fast as the software business as a whole. A key enabler for this development is the Internet itself, which is currently at the cusp of a transformation, moving from Web2 - social networking sites - to Web3 - semantic applications The Semantic web enables data to be linked to and expressed in meaningful ways, delivering a wide-range of benefits to end-users. The critical path to success is to understand end-user needs, then to develop applications that meet such needs. The global race to build semantic applications started in earnest at the WWW Conference in April 2009, where the full potential of linked data was demonstrated. In April 2009, the NIC joined this race. The prize to those who succeed at building the first set of compelling semantic applications is significant, given how important speed and access to quality information is to clinical decision-making, investment, and performance in the global economy. Having produced compelling applications to empower key NHS Stakeholder groups, the NIC will be well-positioned in its delivery on a number of key DH policy initiatives, including: ,[object Object]

Office of Live Science: Delivering the Blueprint (DBIS & DH, January 2010), and

Operational Efficiency Programme: Final Report (HM Treasury: April, 2009).

Components of the Linked Data System

There are a number of key components of the Linked Data system that are important to ensuring that the system functions optimally. Described in more detail, below, these components include: ontology, triple-store, data, and applications.

An ontology is is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. In Computer science an ontology is a formal representation of the knowledge by a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to describe the domain. An ontology provides a shared vocabulary, which can be used to model a domain – that is, the type of objects and/or concepts that exist, and their properties and relations.

Since April 2009, the NIC has been building an Innovation bridging ontology, which is known as ‘OHIO’ (Open Health Innovation Ontology). By that we mean that the ontology covers the full life-cycle of an innovation, starting with need, then leading to commissioning, then R&D, and then market entry. This bridging ontology has been crafted through the creation of bespoke innovation ontology components, which have been enhanced with ontologies that are currently widely-used, such as FoF (Friend-of-a-Friend, as used in Linked-In and Facebook) and Dublin Core (used in document classifications).Triple-Store In the Semantic Web. an ontology is often expressed computationally as either OWL (Web Ontology Language) or SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System). Data, which sits in a triple-store (which is a type of database for the semantic web), is rendered against OWL or SKOS. Following this rendering, the semantically-enhanced data can be disseminated via the tipple-store’s ‘sparkle-endpoint. This semantically-enhanced data can then be expressed via a wide range of applications, many of which are freely available via open-source, such as MIT’s SIMILE and Google. The end result of this semantic pipeline is that the end-user is much more likely to get information that is highly context-specific and meaningful than what is currently the case. The inter-relationships between these components is illustrated below. Data Note, from the illustration above, that in order for the system to work optimally so that it delivers benefits to end-users, there is a need for high-quality data, ontologies, and applications. Data may come from a wide-range of sources. In order to deliver a quick-win, the NIC has commissioned the curation of semantically enhanced data from: ,[object Object]

QinetiQ (future technologies) , and

Innovation Exchange (technology market assessments. Each supplier is working to their own unique strengths and are providing data that will contribute to meaningful information via the applications. It should be noted that the curation of data can be expensive and time-consuming. As part of a global trend, data is becoming increasingly freely available from government as well as private-sector sources. In order to benefit from these developments, this initiative will link to high-value data sources that are already freely available from other trusted sources (e.g. data.gov.uk, PubMed, NHS Network, NHS Information Centre, to name a few). Such data will normally get to the NIC’s triple store via direct feeds. Once in the triple-store the data will be rendered via OWL and SKOS, as described above. Another way that the NIC will be able to receive data is to have RDFa code (which contains the NIC ontology), which can be imbedded into other sites. The benefit of this is that the data that the NIC’s triple-store receives will have a high degree of specificity. To help propagate RDFa uptake on other sites, the NIC will provide tutorials and free downloads of the RDFa code. In addition to this, all applications that the NIC develops will include RDFa and management tracking code. What this means, practically, is that when an application is downloaded from the NIC site and uploaded onto another site, both the RDFa code and the management tracking code are also downloaded. Note that widgets will be designed to ensure informed consent from end-users – ie the user will explicitly grant or not grant use of RDFa code and management tracking code in the Terms and Conditions of use. The benefit of this will be that the NIC will be able to extend its access to both data and networks, and also produce evaluation metrics to inform the NIC business. Applications Recently, there have been big advances in displaying massive amounts of data to make them easily accessible. This is emerging as a vibrant and creative field, melding the skills of computer science, statistics, artistic design and storytelling. Gapminder, for example, enables people to load data into applications, which generate new understanding and innovative ways to communicate. Example of Gapminder display of data Having entered data and produced a graph, end-users are also able to share their graph with others. This entire offer is provided via a simple, easy-to-use interface, as illustrated below. Example of Gapminder Data-Sharing Tool One of the consequences of the Gapfinder initiative is that a number of people have started to produce open source libraries that can enact some of these kinds of visualisations. This provides an important opportunity for the NIC to become a Go-To place, where the NIC will: ,[object Object]

provide space for others to create and post their own applications

enable stakeholders to use the applications to inform their decision-making

enable stakeholders to share their data outputs with others. This would contribute to the NIC ontology, increase the amount of data in the NIC’s data hopper, and encourage a community of users.

provide added-value widgets, which end-users can upload onto their sites. These widgets will contain RDFa code and management tracking code, which the end-user can choose to enable or not. For the end-user, benefits include having their data (e.g. innovations) contribute to the larger data base and the applications arising from these (e.g. mapping of innovations). For the NIC, benefits include further reach to networks and datasets, and the ability to track and evaluate the impact of the NIC’s offering.Progress to Date From April 2009, the NIC assembled a group of leading experts operating in the semantic web space. The NIC’s goal is to exploit the potential of the semantic web to support innovation development in the NHS. The NIC has: NIC Server on the Cloud The idea of this was to establish a triple-store in the cloud, running 4Store, and then import the Virtuoso triples into it. Once there, the aim was to allow these triples to be queries using SPARQL. All of this was to be reproducible by running scripts to launch further servers. The server is running and has been demoed. There is one remaining deliverable which I'd like to do, which is to move all of the scripts into the new Linked Data Platform project. I'd hoped to do that this week, but it looks like it will have to wait until the end of next week, now. Application Demonstrators In order to test the Linked-Data system, the NIC commissioned the development of two demonstrators are able to prove data being obtained from the triple store, via the SPARQL end-point, could be displayed in a widget of some kind. These tests have proved successful. Both of these applications, described in more detail, below, will become part of the widget platform/iStation. Smaller Demo In the end we went further and used this demo to (a) illustrate that we could convert the data into other formats, and (b) provide a second visualisation. The first format that we were able to convert to was the Google Visualization data format, and by supporting that we opened up a whole library of widgets that can be used with the data. The second format that we can convert to is MIT's Exhibit format, which gave us access to a basic faceted browser and a timeline component. Larger Demo The larger demo is about linking a number of different data visualisations together. For this we chose information that could be represented on a map, in a bar chart, and in a stacked chart. As the selection criteria is changed (data range, for example), all of the components on the page change at the same time. This is more ambitious than the simple demo, because it involves binding components together. But it builds on the first demo, because the basic unit that we want to build the page from is a simple widget. This means that once the framework is complete we can add any widgets we like to a page, and create quite complex layouts. This work is pretty much complete. The framework part has been in place for about a week now, but what has held up the final stage is the lack of grouping support in 4Store, which makes it impossible to count things such as 'the number of innovations set to enter the market in 2020, grouped by the setting in which they would be used'. For now we're working around this by adding that counting mechanism to the JavaScript code, which should be ready shortly. NLP Crawler The crawler work is underway. The aim in this project is to install the GATE framework on the same box as the triple-store, and to do it in such a way that it can be split out onto a different server if necessary (NLP processing can be quite resource-hungry, so we need to retain flexibility). Once GATE is installed then some of the GATE plug-ins [1] can be added and configured. The first step is taking a little longer than anticipated in terms of the configuration scripts, but it should be resolved at the end of next week. Once that is done, the GATE modules I'm proposing to install are: Reuters' OpenCalais; KEA's SKOS processing. This would be configured to do two things: look for MeSH terms; look for terms from our own SKOS vocabularies (such as SHAs, scenario locations, and so on). The reason for picking this collection is as follows: OpenCalais provides a good spread of news-related terms, that are by their nature non-specialist, but give a good sweep. This means that we'll pick up a lot of basic information such as countries and cities, high-profile companies and people, universities, and so on; KEA can process any SKOS document -- you probably remember that SKOS is a vocabulary language -- and use that to provide terms against which to run the NLP. This is ideal, because when our developer created the OWL ontologies for tmg, he adopted a strategy of using SKOS for any lists of items, such as SHAs, innovation status, types of innovation, and so on. All of these can be fed in to the NLP engine. Also, someone has produced a SKOS version of MeSH, which would be interesting to feed in. Once the NLP framework is in place, our plan is to 'point' the crawler at the current NIC web-site (competitions, needs, forums, etc.), and one other location, such as New Scientist, PubMed, or something along those lines. Adding more targets for crawling will be an ongoing task, of course, so ongoing management of the service will need to be in place after the build. Data Curation The NIC has commissioned the semantic curation of publically available files. Over 5,500 files have been loaded onto the NIC’s triple-store as of 20 April 2010. June Deliverable Linked Data This the new public face of the Linked Data Platform (LDP), and would have the following features: ,[object Object]

instructions on how to embed RDFa. This work is being carried out separately, but will be incorporated into this area.

OHIO Project Semantic Web Benefits

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