Semantic warehousing of diverse biomedical information

One of the main challenges of data warehousing within biomedical information infrastructures is to enable semantic interoperability between its various stakeholders as well as other interested parties. Promoting the adoption of worldwide accepted information standards along with common controlled terminologies is the right path to achieve that. The HL7 v3 Reference Information Model (RIM) is used to derive consistent health information standards such as laboratory, clinical health record data, problem- and goal-oriented care, public health and clinical research. In this paper we describe a RIM-based warehouse which provides (1) the means for data integration gathered from disparate and diverse data sources, (2) a mixture of XML and relational schemas and (3) a uniform abstract access and query capabilities serving both healthcare and clinical research users. Through the use of constrained standards (templates),we facilitate semantic interoperability which would be harder to achieve if we only used generic standards in use cases with unique requirements. Such semantic warehousing also lays the groundwork for harmonized representations of data, information and knowledge, and thus enables a single infrastructure to serve analysis tools, decision support applications, clinical data exchange, and point-of-care applications. In addition, we describe the implementation of that semantic warehousing within Hypergenes, a European Commission funded project focused on Essential Hypertension, to illustrate the unique concepts and capabilities of our warehouse.