Representation of relationships between data in healthcare documents.

In healthcare data are to a large extent represented in narrative textual documents. The analysis of narrative text has not been solved successfully up to now. The results of natural language processing or fully indexing systems have not been completely satisfying. It is in particular difficult to detect and describe reliably relationships between data items in narrative text. The eXtensible Markup Language XML has opened new and very promising perspectives in this environment which could improve the storage, processing and analysis of narrative textual documents in particular in healthcare.