Semantic warehousing

Certain area like medical and clinical, data is digitalized text. Key value operation is less useful for the digitalized text. Semantic warehousing is base of digitalized text data using similar functions as Data warehousing (DW), such as ETL(Extract, transform, load), ODS(Operational_data_store), and MODEL.
Semantic warehousing is different from DW in that semantic information base from text(semantic) data.
Semantic warehousing is different from search engine in that semantic information base from text data stored in database.(DBMS)

Though data is most important word in computing era, it can not explain human knowledge well yet. Data(numeric data) is key element of computing systems for certain organization (especially companies, enterprises), but no performance oriented organization needs something to gather and use knowledge or human feeling. Semantic warehousing will be equally or more important than data warehousing in the future.

Definition

Semantic warehousing is a conceptual and functional term in that gather from source, semantically define and provide information from digitalized text based knowledge data.

Background

Data warehousing (DW) is popular these days. Gathering data from systems that generate transactions, data warehouse become base of information. Key of data warehouse is model (called datamart) and model is made of dimensions(key) and measures(value). User get information from the models by doing certain operations. Online analytical processing (OLAP) is most important operation for the users to get information from the DW models. Handling dimensions with pivoting, drilling, slice & dice operations user get numeric values like sales amount, growth rate, etc.

Practices

Some hospital implement semantic warehousing for clinical information (SWCI). Medical information is now knowledge network level. UMLS define semantic knowledge network of medical language. Currently medical information stored in database and not fully used for clinic. Semantic warehousing is next stage of digitalized medical information.

SWCI is a name of conceptual system of clinical information.
Named by Juhan Kim (SNUH, Seoul National University Hospital) and Bohyon Hwang, YongChan Keum(ITPartnerZ) on 2008.

Defined architecture on SWCI ;
1. Semantic-oriented cleansing
2. Semantic-oriented meta management
3. Clinical(Medical) knowledge basement
4. Semantic-oriented user intelligence

Connected area

- Semantic web
- Ontology
- Knowledge
- Medical and healthcare : EMR(Electronic medical record), EHR(Electronic health record)
- Data warehouse
- AI (artificial intelligence)

References

 Data Quality article mentioning that semantically rich DW.
 http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs227/Papers/Projects/iq97_dwq.pdf

  • An Integrative and Uniform Model for Metadata Management in Data Warehousing Environment.

 Semantic metadata and technical metadata.
 http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-19/paper12.pdf