Semantically Annotated Metadata: Interconnecting Samply.MDR and MDM-Portal.

Interoperability is a growing demand in healthcare, caused by heterogeneous sources, which aggravate information transfer. The interoperability issues can be addressed by metadata repositories. These support to ensure syntactical interoperability, like compatible data formats or value ranges, however especially semantic interoperability is still challenging. Semantic annotation through standardized terminologies and classifications enables to foster semantic interoperability. This work aims to interconnect Samply.MDR and Portal of Medical Data Model (MDM-Portal) to allow facilitated semantic annotation with UMLS. Therefore, Samply.MDR was extended to store semantic information. While creating a data element, a request to MDM is send, which results in possible UMLS codes. The user can now adopt the most suitable code and select a link type between the code and the element itself. A successful enrichment of data elements with UMLS codes was shown by interconnecting Samply.MDR and MDM-Portal.