Semantic service matchmaking for Digital Health Ecosystems

The vision of Digital Ecosystems was initiated by the European Commission, with the purpose of constructing an information and communication technology environment to facilitate the sustainable development of small and medium enterprises. As a key sub-domain of Digital Ecosystems, Digital Health Ecosystems provide crucial services to maintain the health of the main participants of Digital Ecosystems. We are concerned with the large-scale, ambiguous, heterogeneous, and untrustworthy nature of health service information in Digital Health Ecosystems. An intensive survey found that current research cannot support accurate and trustworthy matchmaking between health service requests and health service advertisements in Digital Health Ecosystems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a framework for a semantic service matchmaker that takes into account the ambiguous, heterogeneous nature of service information in Digital Health Ecosystems. This framework is designed to make four major contributions, which are health service domain knowledge modeling, online health service information disambiguation, health service query disambiguation and health service quality evaluation and ranking. In order to thoroughly evaluate this framework, we implement a prototype - a Semantic Health Service Search Engine, and conduct a series of experiments on the prototype using a functional testing and simulation approach. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.