Using XML and controlled vocabularies to achieve unambiguous knowledge acquisition from multiple heterogeneous medical data sources

In this paper we describe an innovative system that aims to integrate heterogeneous distributed healthcare information resources. It is based on the advantages of technologies like the extensible markup language (XML), controlled vocabularies (CVs) such as wordnet and the unified medical language system (UMLS), as well as the common object request broker architecture (CORBA). The proposed approach is based on three key functionalities: a) the user-transparent acquisition of each source's structural information, b) the lexical and semantical analysis based elaboration of the user's initial query and c) the appropriate combination of the results from the two previous functionalities, aiming to the selection of the query that corresponds with each source. CORBA is responsible for providing the interoperability between objects in this disparate distributed environment.