Exchanging Data and Knowledge in a Healthcare Setting

Use Case Description

Goal of the use case

We address the challenge of managing personal health data that is currently distributed over different places. We research how citizens can keep control over their data and can give permission to third parties to use their data.

In the Flanders AI Resarch Program, the partners VITO, UHasselt, UGent and VUB collaborated on the research and development of a platform for management and sharing of personal health data.

We use the ‘solid’ technology, in which citizens have their own data pod in which they can store their health data. We give the control over the peronal health data to the citizen. Citizens can manage their health data preventively, before they become patients. Citizens can give permission to academic partners, government and companies to use their data for research, which is beneficial for innovation and policy making. 

The research includes the development of personal information agents that can exchange information with applications that have the required permission. This includes research on schema mappings: the integration of information from different sources in different formats and query rewriting: the automatic rewriting of queries sent by applications to the agents, depending on how the data is stored in the personal pods.

In addition, we research the set-up of the platform: how to take into account the values of citizens and gain their trust in the data platform.

Results

The methods are applied to data collected by "de Gezondheidsgids" of Domus Medica, the association of general medical practitioners, in the frame of another project, BIBOPP (Burgers In Beweging met een Online Preventie Platform). BIBOPP is one of the applications that will make use of the data platform. For privacy reasons, the research program makes use of data of fictitious persons.

Demonstrator: POD-QUERY: Schema Mapping and Query Rewriting for Solid Pods

We envisage a decentralized Web architecture in which access to data in Solid pods is mediated by Web agents. Leveraging methods from information integration and data exchange, Web agents can give clients access to views defined by schema mappings. Queries formulated by clients over the view are rewritten by the agent to queries that work correctly over the base data. POD-QUERY is our prototype implementation of such an architecture, where schema alignment is specified by RDF-to-RDF mappings written in RML, and SPARQL queries are rewritten based on these mappings. We demonstrate our system in a personal health scenario.

The POD-QUERY demo is available online at https://podquery-demo.vito.be/

Its use is demonstrated in this video:

Uptake

Results and ideas will be included in the We Are Health project, lead by VITO.

Basic Use Case Info 

Period

2019-2023 

Contact

Bart Buelens

Research Groups

VITO, UHasselt (DBTI), UGent (IDLab), VUB (AI Lab)

Publications 

M. Vandenbrande, M. Jakubowski, P. Bonte, B. BUelens, F. Ongenae, and J. Van den Bussche, “POD-QUERY: Schema Mapping and Query Rewriting for Solid Pods,” presented at the ISWC2023, the International Semantic Web Conference, Athens, Greece, 2023.

A. P. Stefanija, B. Buelens, E. Goesaert, T. Lenaerts, J. Pierson, and J. Van den Bussche. Toward a Solid Acceptance of the Decentralized Web of Personal Data: Societal and Technological Convergence. Commun. ACM 67, 1 (January 2024), 43–46. https://doi.org/10.1145/3624555