An Efficient and Adaptive Framework to Access Heterogeneous Health Information Sources

Abstract

In health informatics, the need for a consistent and integrated view of distributed and heterogeneous information sources is inevitable. Healthcare, medical education and research could benefit of integrating medical information of patients or about a disease, a treatment or side effects of a drug. This article proposes a flexible incremental update method for the materialized part of the integration system. It permits us to manage the integration system according to the characteristics of the data sources, which can be changed. We present a hybrid data integration approach.In this approach the materialized part of the system in mediator is the object indexation structure based on an instance classification of the sources objects which correspond to the global schema. The object identifier of each object in the indexation structure is materialized together with the attributes which are needed for the incremental updating of this indexation (classifying attributes).