Evolution of semantic annotations (ELISA)

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Erhard Rahm
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems ; Epidemiology and Medical Biometry/Statistics
• Term: from 2015 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265240015

The use of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) such as thesauri or ontologies in the medical field has shown great value to tackle semantic interoperability issues. In many cases, KOS are used to annotate real world objects such as electronic health records (EHR), case report forms (CRF) of clinical trials, genes or publications in order to make their semantics explicit for applications and tools. The dynamic nature of medical knowledge forces knowledge engineers to continuously revise the content of either KOSs or underlying data. These changes may directly impact the annotations associated with changed concepts or changed data. Hence, new KOS versions can invalidate previous annotations. Similarly, if the content of an annotated document is modified the existing annotation may become irrelevant. As a result, many annotations can lose their relevance and value thus impeding the intended use and exploitation of annotated data. The ELISA (Evolution of Semantic Annotations) project therefore will develop methods and tools for supporting the (semi-)automatic maintenance of semantic annotations affected by KOS or information evolution in order to keep annotations exploitable. The proposed approaches will be based on a comprehensive annotation model and make use of fine-grained information coming from KOS as well as information evolution to define a robust maintenance mechanism for preserving the validity of semantic annotations over time. The proposed framework will include different approaches to evolve or migrate annotations affected by changes, either by modifying annotations directly or an indirect way when annotations cannot directly be changed, e.g., in the case of encrypted EHRs. The ELISA approaches will be empirically evaluated using annotations between corpora of documents such as EHRs or CRFs and large biomedical KOS like SNOMED CT, NCI thesaurus and ICD-10. Expert-validated annotations will be available from real case studies in the Luxembourgish eSanté platform as well as the Leipzig Research Centre for Civilization Diseases (LIFE).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Luxembourg
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Cedric Pruski