Touré Vasundra, Unni Deepak, Krauss Philip, Abdelwahed Abdelhamid, Buchhorn Jascha, Hinderling Leon, Geiger Thomas R, Österle Sabine
Personalized Health Informatics, SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Basel, 4051, Switzerland.
Accenture, Basel, 4051, Switzerland.
J Biomed Semantics. 2025 May 8;16(1):9. doi: 10.1186/s13326-025-00330-9.
The Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) adopted the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a core component of the Semantic Web technology stack, for the formal encoding and exchange of healthcare data in a medical knowledge graph. The SPHN RDF Schema defines the semantics on how data elements should be represented. While RDF is proven to be machine readable and interpretable, it can be challenging for individuals without specialized background to read and understand the knowledge represented in RDF. For this reason, the semantics described in the SPHN RDF Schema are primarily defined in a user-accessible tabular format, the SPHN Dataset, before being translated into its RDF representation. However, this translation process was previously manual, time-consuming and labor-intensive.
To automate and streamline the translation from tabular to RDF representation, the SPHN Schema Forge web service was developed. With a few clicks, this tool automatically converts an SPHN-compliant Dataset spreadsheet into an RDF schema. Additionally, it generates SHACL rules for data validation, an HTML visualization of the schema and SPARQL queries for basic data analysis.
The SPHN Schema Forge significantly reduces the manual effort and time required for schema generation, enabling researchers to focus on more meaningful tasks such as data interpretation and analysis within the SPHN framework.
瑞士个性化健康网络（SPHN）采用了资源描述框架（RDF），这是语义网技术栈的一个核心组件，用于在医学知识图谱中对医疗数据进行形式化编码和交换。SPHN RDF模式定义了数据元素应如何表示的语义。虽然RDF已被证明是机器可读和可解释的，但对于没有专业背景的个人来说，阅读和理解RDF中表示的知识可能具有挑战性。因此，SPHN RDF模式中描述的语义主要以用户可访问的表格形式（即SPHN数据集）定义，然后再转换为其RDF表示形式。然而，此翻译过程以前是手动的，既耗时又费力。
为了实现从表格到RDF表示的自动化和简化，开发了SPHN Schema Forge网络服务。通过点击几下，该工具就能自动将符合SPHN的数据集电子表格转换为RDF模式。此外，它还会生成用于数据验证的SHACL规则、模式的HTML可视化以及用于基本数据分析的SPARQL查询。
SPHN Schema Forge显著减少了模式生成所需的人工工作量和时间，使研究人员能够专注于更有意义的任务，如在SPHN框架内进行数据解释和分析。
