Annotation and Image Markup: Accessing and Interoperating with the Semantic Content in Medical Imaging

The annotation and image markup project makes large distributed collections of medical images in cyberspace and hospital information systems accessible using an information model of image content and ontologies. Interest in applying semantic Web technologies to the life sciences continues to accelerate. Biomedical research is increasingly an online activity as scientists combine and explore different types of data in cyberspace, putting together complementary views on problems that lead to new insights and discoveries. An e-Science paradigm is thus emerging; the biomedical community is looking for tools to help access, query, and analyze a myriad of data in cyberspace. Specifically, the biomedical community is beginning to embrace technologies such as ontologies to integrate scientific knowledge, standard syntaxes, and semantics to make biomedical knowledge explicit, and the semantic Web to establish virtual collaborations.