Wherever you look in healthcare there are too many elaborate standards (see Eric Browne's recent presentation on the semantic ambiguity of HL7) and too few effective ones. The NHS for example is awash with standard vocabularies – SNOMED, Read Codes, Clinical Terms, ICD 9 and 10, MeSH, OPCS, HRGs, NHS Data Dictionary, BNF Drug Categories, DMD. Yet none of them are used widely or applied consistently, nor are they interoperable – and none of them produce patient benefit. To imagine that this situation might be improved by adding RDF is a complete non-starter, even in areas such as drug discovery. In contrast, modest applications such as Google Flu trends, which links public health surveillance to search trends, might just be useful. There is one area where the idea of linked data ought to be surfacing - PCT data analysis - but there's no sign of any RDF activity in public health informatics.
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