Semantically Structured Web Form and Data Storage: A Generic Ontology-Driven Approach Applied to Breast Cancer.

Interoperability issues are common in biomedical informatics. Structured data acquisition modalities are of major importance since the data acquired need to be adequately structured and encoded to be automatically processed by dedicated systems. We have developed a web application that generates a semantically structured web form from an ontology. Beyond allowing for structured patient data acquisition, the application allows to save patient data in a triplestore storage solution, and to retrieve them. Thus, the application provides a solution for the user to edit, display, and delete patient data, when necessary. The method has been applied to generate a web form to acquire patient data from the breast cancer knowledge model structured as an OWL ontology of the guideline-based decision support system within the European-funded DESIREE project.