Towards semantic integration within an existing medical information system.

Talking about the problems of integration in medical information systems, the necessity to provide end users with a consistent and coherent view of patient's data, has been largely reported. In order to attempt this goal, systems need to perform semantic integration. We propose a pragmatic way to describe the semantics of the elements of a database, based on a bottom-up three steps process: 1. a back documentation of the elements of the system from their description contained in the data catalog of the database 2. a first semantic extension to transform a data catalog into a data dictionary 3. a second semantic extension to create a dictionary of the medical concepts from a data dictionary. This dictionary of concepts can be considered as the final result of "semantic integration". It contains a set of entities directly understandable by the end users. These entities are deduced or built from the elements collected and characterized in the data dictionary. This work reports the conceptual analysis and the implementation of such a data dictionary.