Software
The SOMWeb system is an online community of practice used for knowledge sharing and dissemination within oral medicine in Sweden.
The Swedish Oral Medicine Network (SOMNet) functions as a community of practice (CoP) within oral medicine in Sweden. As such, SOMNet promotes the collection of cases for subsequent analysis and harmonization within the field. Through regularly held teleconference meetings, SOMNet provides means for distance consultations and learning for a broader audience. In this, SOMNet is an important platform in the interaction between oral medicine and related medical specialties.
Members of SOMNet can use SOMWeb to add cases, with associated pictures, that are discussed at SOMNet meetings. The activities supported by SOMWeb include browsing cases, meetings, and members of the system; looking at presentations of individual cases and meetings (past, current, or future); adding and administering the cases one owns; administering meetings; reading news; and using the discussion forum, with threads both associated with individual cases and topics that are more general
SOMWeb is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) of the Semantic Web, and uses ontologies for representing examination templates, values used in filling in templates, and for representing community data (including information about users, meetings, cases, and news).
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Publications
Journal papers
Falkman, G., Gustafsson, M., Jontell, M. and Torgersson, O. (2008), SOMWeb: A Semantic Web-based System for Supporting Collaboration of Distributed Medical Communities of Practice. Journal of Medical Internet Research 10(3):e25, Special Issue on Medicine 2.0. doi: 10.2196/jmir.1059.
Information technology (IT) support for remote collaboration of geographically distributed communities of practice (CoP) in health care must deal with a number of sociotechnical aspects of communication within the community. In the mid-1990s, participants of the Swedish Oral Medicine Network (SOMNet) began discussing patient cases in telephone conferences. The cases were distributed prior to the conferences using PowerPoint and email. For the technical support of online CoP, Semantic Web technologies can potentially fulfill needs of knowledge reuse, data exchange, and reasoning based on ontologies. However, more research is needed on the use of Semantic Web technologies in practice.
The objectives of this research were to (1) study the communication of distributed health care professionals in oral medicine; (2) apply Semantic Web technologies to describe community data and oral medicine knowledge; (3) develop an online CoP, Swedish Oral Medicine Web (SOMWeb), centered on user-contributed case descriptions and meetings; and (4) evaluate SOMWeb and study how work practices change with IT support.
Based on Java, and using the Web Ontology Language and Resource Description Framework for handling community data and oral medicine knowledge, SOMWeb was developed using a user-centered and iterative approach. For studying the work practices and evaluating the system, a mixed-method approach of interviews, observations, and a questionnaire was used.
By May 2008, there were 90 registered users of SOMWeb, 93 cases had been added, and 18 meetings had utilized the system. The introduction of SOMWeb has improved the structure of meetings and their discussions, and a tenfold increase in the number of participants has been observed. Users submit cases to seek advice on diagnosis or treatment, to show an unusual case, or to create discussion. Identified barriers to submitting cases are lack of time, concern about whether the case is interesting enough, and showing gaps in one’s own knowledge. Three levels of member participation are discernable: a core group that contributes most cases and most meeting feedback; an active group that participates often but only sometimes contribute cases and feedback; and a large peripheral group that seldom or never contribute cases or feedback.
SOMWeb is beneficial for individual clinicians as well as for the SOMNet community. The system provides an opportunity for its members to share both high quality clinical practice knowledge and external evidence related to complex oral medicine cases. The foundation in Semantic Web technologies enables formalization and structuring of case data that can be used for further reasoning and research. Main success factors are the long history of collaboration between different disciplines, the user-centered development approach, the existence of a “champion” within the field, and nontechnical community aspects already being in place.
Jontell, M., Falkman, G., Gustafsson, M. and Torgersson, O. (2008), Elektroniskt verktyg för klinik, utbildning och forskning. To appear in Journal of the Swedish Dental Association 100(12), 46–49.
Conference and workshop contributions
Gustafsson, M. (2008), Case Sharing and Ontology Structuring in an Online Oral Medicine Community. Accepted at 1st International Workshop on Incentives for the Semantic Web (INSEMTIVE 2008), October 27 2008, Karlsruhe, Germany.
The Swedish Oral Medicine Web (SOMWeb) is an online system built to support knowledge sharing among oral medicine practitioners who hold monthly telephone conferences to discuss difficult and interesting cases. Semantic Web technologies are used to model the templates used for case entry, the ontology of values used in filling in cases, and community data. To study the practitioners' use and perceptions of the collaboration and the SOMWeb system, we have used observations of teleconferences, interviews with participants, and an online questionnaire. These are analyzed to provide an understanding of the participants' opinions about the structured case entry and why they do or do not contribute. This is followed by a discussion on future work where the value ontology is made available for community editing and structuring, and incentives for user contributions to this process.
Gustafsson, M., Falkman, G., Torgersson, O. and Jontell, M. (2008). Collaboration Patterns in a Medical Community of Practice. Poster presented at the 16th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2008), 29th September–3rd October 2008, Acitrezza, Catania, Italy.
Since the mid 1990’s, the Swedish Oral Medicine Network (SOMNet) has promoted the harmonization and dissemination of knowledge and the sharing of clinical experience within oral medicine. SOMWeb is an online system supporting SOMNet’s activities by providing facilities for adding and administering cases to be discussed at SOMNet meetings; browsing cases, meetings, and members of the system; looking at presentations of individual cases and meetings; administering meetings; and reading news. Community aspects of SOMWeb are modeled in OWL and data is stored as RDF. In our previous research, we have studied clinicians’ use of SOMWeb as well as the possibility of using ideas from the Pragmatic Web to describe communications patterns within the community. In this paper, we continue this research by presenting ideas on how collaboration patterns within the domain can be identified, modeled, and be put into use.
Falkman, G., Gustafsson, M., Torgersson, T. and Jontell, M. (2008), The Origin, Representation, and Use of Collaboration Patterns in a Medical Community of Practice. In: Lytras, M.D. et al. (eds.): Emerging Technologies and Information Systems for the Knowledge Society. Proceedings of the First World Summit, WSKS 2008, Athens, Greece, September 24–26, 2008, vol. 5288 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 403–412. Springer-Verlag.
Founded on the Semantic Web technologies OWL and RDF, SOMWeb is an online community of practice that is used for knowledge sharing and dissemination within an oral medicine community in Sweden. It is shown how patterns for communication and collaboration within SOMWeb can be identified and represented in OWL, in terms of knowledge components, such as ontologies describing domain knowledge, user models, and organization models. It is described how patterns could be put into use and inform the design of future versions of SOMWeb.
Falkman, G., Gustafsson, M., Jontell, M. and Torgersson, O. (2008). Collaboration Patterns in an Online Community of Practice in Oral Medicine. In: Andersen, S.K., Klein, G.O., Schulz, S., Jos Aarts, M., and Mazzoleni, C. (eds.): eHealth Beyond the Horizon – Get IT There. Proceedings of MIE2008. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 136, pp. 175–180. IOS Press.
SOMWeb is an online collaboration system based on Semantic Web technologies, which is used for knowledge sharing and dissemination within an oral medicine community in Sweden. Based on a previous study of the use of SOMWeb, general patterns of interaction and communicative activities involved in community collaboration have been identified. The patterns for one such activity, distance consultation, are described and modeled using techniques from the Pragmatic Web.
Gustafsson, M and Falkman, G. (2008). Study of Use and Needs of an Online Community of Practice in Oral Medicine. Poster presented at the 21st International Congress of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (MIE 2008), Göteborg, Sweden, May 25–28 2008.
We describe an ongoing study of the use of a Semantic Web based online system for knowledge sharing and dissemination in oral medicine. The system is used by a group of clinicians in Sweden who hold monthly teleconference meetings. The objectives of the study are to evaluate how well the system suits the needs of the users, identify how the system can better support the knowledge needs of the user, and to identify how the users and the distributed organization can be modeled using ontologies. The methods used are interviews, observations of meetings, and an online questionnaire.
Khan, F. S., Anwer, R. M., Torgersson, O. and Falkman, G. (2008). Data Mining in Oral Medicine Using Decision Trees. In: Proceedings of World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology 27, pp. 225–230.
Data mining has been used very frequently to extract hidden information from large databases. This paper suggests the use of decision trees for continuously extracting the clinical reasoning in the form of medical expert’s actions that is inherent in large number of EMRs (Electronic Medical records). In this way the extracted data could be used to teach students of oral medicine a number of orderly processes for dealing with patients who represent with different problems within the practice context over time.
Falkman, G., Gustafsson, M., Jontell, M. and Torgersson, O. (2007). Towards Pragmatic Patterns for Clinical Knowledge Management. In: S. Buckingham Shum, M. Lind and H. Weigand (eds.): Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22–23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL,vol. 280 of ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, pp. 65–74. doi: doi.acm.org/10.1145/1324237.1324245.
We present a research program for identifying, modeling, and making use of generic pragmatic patterns for clinical knowledge management that support evidence-based medicine (EBM). Part of this program is SOMWeb, a system based on Semantic Web technologies, which is used for knowledge sharing and dissemination within an oral medicine community. A study of the use of SOMWeb has been conducted as the first step in the elicitation of important contextual factors and communicative activities involved in knowledge sharing processes in oral medicine. One such activity, community discussion activation, is described using consultation patterns together with the collaboration patterns of de Moor. The general need for context-aware health information systems and the prospective use of approaches within Pragmatic Web in the pursuit of EBM are also discussed.
[» Presentation (PDF, 1 MB).]
Gustafsson, M. and Falkman, G. (2007). Modeling Contexts of Knowledge Sharing in an Online Community for Oral Medicine. In P. Bouquet (ed.): CONTEXT'07 Doctorial Consortium Proceedings, Computer Science Research Report no. 118, Roskilde University, Denmark, October 2007, pp. 30–43.
To support knowledge sharing between practitioners of oral medicine throughout Sweden, the SOMWeb system for community collaboration has been constructed, based on Semantic Web technologies. A large function of the system is to support the discussion of difficult and interesting cases at a monthly telephone conference. From our observations of these meetings, a the users’ responses to a questionnaire, and discussions with users, we find that many of the improvements that can be made to enable further use of the system relate to adding the use of context. Some initial thoughts on what would be relevant to represent in relation to context are given, such as the experience of the practitioner, the reason for adding a case to the system, and the current activity of the user. The long-term aims of this work is to identify aspects of context relevant to online communities of practice in healthcare, and to investigate how these contexts can be modeled using Semantic Web technologies.
Gustafsson, M. och Falkman, G. (2007). Experiences in Modeling Clinical Examinations in Oral Medicine Using OWL. In: Proceedings of OWL: Experiences and Directions: 3rd International Workshop, Innsbruck, Austria, June 6–7 2007, CEUR Electronic Workshop Proceedings Volume 258. ISSN 1613-0073.
This article describes the modeling of clinical examinations in oral medicine using OWL. Based on experiences from our previous work and knowledge model, requirements for an ontology for examinations in oral medicine are identified. OWL can be used to address most, but not all, of the requirements. We found a lack of guidance for several design choices and for development of OWL ontologies at different levels of sophistication. However, using OWL gives us the ability to come back and refine the knowledge model after initial deployment.
Reports
Falkman, G. Torgersson, O. and Jontell, M. (2006). Pragmatic Patterns for Clinical Knowledge Management. Research proposal to the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA). In Swedish.
The project’s purpose is to obtain further knowledge of how pragmatic patterns for clinical knowledge management that support evidence-based health care should be modelled, implemented and introduced into clinical practice. Through the parallel development of a tool for web-based knowledge sharing and a clinical decision-support system for use in oral medicine, problems concerned with the formalisation of clinical data and the context of knowledge processes, and interaction and conversation in knowledge processes are addressed. Expected results are improved strategies for evidence-based health care in oral medicine and contributions to open standards for representing patient data (openEHR) and to the Pragmatic Web.
Theses
Gustafsson, M. (2006). Design, Development, and Adoption of Ontology-Driven Clinical Software. Licentiate thesis, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology. December 2006.
This thesis addresses how ontology-driven applications can be designed and developed to support distributed clinical knowledge management in oral medicine, where geographically dispersed practitioners need to share practical clinical knowledge. A step in developing tools for knowledge management is representing knowledge in a machineprocessable and sharable manner. We investigate the use of the World Wide Web Consortium’s recommendations of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) to describe clinical knowledge in oral medicine. The MedView project, a cooperation between clinicians in oral medicine and computer scientists, provides a basis for this work. Limitations of MedView’s original knowledge model are identified, together with a list of requirements for a new model. In this new model, OWL and RDF are used for representing examination templates, value lists, aggregates of values, and individual examination records. Further, we give a description of how the ISO/IEC 15288 system life cycle processes can be used to structure the ontology development process. To support distributed knowledge management in oral medicine, an online community for sharing and discussing difficult and interesting cases was built, which uses OWL and RDF for representing examinations, users, meetings, news, and case meta-data. OWL and RDF were found to support the requirements of making ontology reuse possible, and different language versions and metadata are more easily represented than in the original model. One of the requirements not readily provided for is capturing interactions between different parts of templates, for which the Semantic Web Rule Language could be used. In practice, we found it hard to find ontologies to reuse. Further, there are differing opinions on the appropriate use of constructs, and OWL doesn’t directly provide the expected validation facilities. Also, we found a lack of guidance for developing OWL ontologies at different levels of sophistication.
Other
Gustafsson, M. (2007). Modeling Contexts of Knowledge Sharing in an Online Community for Oral Medicine. Presentation from the 3rd Reasoning Web 2007 – Summer School, September 3–7, 2007, Dresden, Germany.
[» Presentation (PDF, 1.6 MB).]