Semantic Based Integration of Heterogeneous Databases

With the development of information technology, databases, search engines and other information technologies have been widely adopted in the health care system. However, sharing of those information resources is impeded by the heterogeneity and distribution among the independently designed and maintained information resources. Aiming at this problem, we bring forward an integration of heterogeneous databases based on semantic Web ontology , which is proposed to draw and represent the common interests of specific groups of people, and hence provide more meaningful and exhaustive query results. As an instance, we developed a unified child psychiatry neuroimaging portal based on the medical database resources such as the Internet brain volume database (IBVD), Pubmed and so on. A prototype is developed to show that this semantic based integration can work well.