The DebugIT core ontology: semantic integration of antibiotics resistance patterns.

Antibiotics resistance development poses a significant problem in today's hospital care. Massive amounts of clinical data are being collected and stored in proprietary and unconnected systems in heterogeneous format. The DebugIT EU project promises to make this data geographically and semantically interoperable for case-based knowledge analysis approaches aiming at the discovery of patterns that help to align antibiotics treatment schemes. The semantic glue for this endeavor is DCO, an application ontology that enables data miners to query distributed clinical information systems in a semantically rich and content driven manner. DCO will hence serve as the core component of the interoperability platform for the DebugIT project. Here we present DCO and an approach thet uses the semantic web query language SPARQL to bind and ontologically query hospital database content using DCO and information model mediators. We provide a query example that indicates that ontological querying over heterogeneous information models is feasible via SPARQL construct- and resource mapping queries.