DISMED: DIstributed Semantic MEDiator
DISMED: DIstributed Semantic MEDiator aims to introduce the following main idea: the design, development, and implementation of an distributed semantic software mediator. The principal goal of the software mediator is the virtual and semantic integration of a federated biomedical resource infrastructure, providing a unified view and normalized access to the whole biomedical knowledge. The software application relies heavily on service-oriented architecture, according to federated data-resource paradigm. Thereby, the software mediator hides the details of information structure, data location, and access mechanism of the underlying physical biomedical data-resources, under a semantic querying interface. The biomedical information stored in the different data-resource is retrieved, joined, and structured following a group of ontology specifications set by the user of the software mediator (e.g. an specific medical ontology). This provides a unified view of the whole biomedical knowledge, in a tailor-made way, in which format and structure of the information are defined by the nature and the requirements of the query of the user.
The project ambition draws a multi-part technological structure, which is possible to split in several well defined pieces or specific objectives with the aim to reduce the complexity of the problem. Firstly, one of the most challenging aspects of the proposal is to deal semantically with several kinds of non-semantic data structures and formats. This situation requires an individualized wrapper for each kind of biomedical resource, thus, it is necessary to build multi-resource access layer to a heterogeneous biomedical knowledge basement.