Mark Birbeck and John Griffin presented their recent work, funded by the NIC, on building a semantic web platform for health data, at Semtech London 2011. The presentation covers the project origins, the technical architecture, challenges that have been faced and a roadmap for developing a generic platform for importing, linking, reasoning over and visualising statistical data

1. A Semantic Web
Platform for
Health Data
Mark Birbeck - Sidewinder Labs
John Griffin - Atchai Digital

2. Aim
• dataShuttle: people toadeploy apps built on
make it easy for
To build platform that will
health data and share visualisations.
• Linkedfor importing, linking,Towards a generic
platform
Data Platform:
reasoning over
and visualising statistical data.

3. Project Background
• Funded by National Innovation Centre, part of
Department of Health.
• Helping business know what the health
service needs.
• Helping the health service know what
business has to offer.
• ... and sometimes funding promising ideas

4. 100
75
50
25
0
Drupal
XLWrap
Triple
SPARQL
Store
scovo Endpoint

5. National Innovation Centre

6. Problems
• Finding data was difficult
• Driving the UI directly from the Triple Store
proved slow.
• Aggregation difficult in SPARQL
• Search and facets difficult in SPARQL
• UI embedded in CMS
• Ontology didn’t reflect statistical nature of
the data.

7. Datacube
• Compatible with SDMX & COG
• Dataset modelled as set of Observations
[measures, dimensions, attributes]
• Allows us to select appropriate
visualisations based on dimension types.
• Allows us to borrow OLAP patterns.
• Allows aggregates across hierarchies of
dimensions.

8. Architecture Changes
• Loosely-coupled services
• Build around an API
• Modelling stats in Datacube
• Data Driven UI
• XForms / jQuery
• Solr / ElasticSearch
• ORDF

10. Links
• Linked Data Platform
https://github.com/sidewinderlabs/
linked-data-platform
• dataShuttle
https://github.com/sidewinderlabs/
dataShuttle
• Atchai Blog
http://atchai.com/blog
• Mark Birbeck @markbirbeck
• John Griffin @johngriffin