Locating Doctors using Social and Semantic Web Technologies: The MedFinder Approach

Abstract

The advent of the information age represents both a challenge and an opportunity for medicine. New forms of diagnosis, innovation-oriented supervision and expert location paths are deeply impacting medical sciences as we know it around the word. In this new scenario, semantic technologies can be seen as new and promising tool to support knowledge-based services, and particularly for the health domain, medical diagnosis. This chapter presents MedFinder, a system based on semantic technologies and social Web to improve patient care for medical diagnosis. The main breakthroughs of MedFinder are the follow-up once the diagnosis is performed, by using a medical ontology and formal reasoning together with rules, since it makes possible to locate the most appropriate doctor for a patient using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and taking into account user preferences given via social Web feedback.