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SOMWeb is an online collaboration system based on Semantic Web technologies, which is used for knowledge sharing and dissemination within an oral medicine community in Sweden. Based on a previous study of the use of SOMWeb, general patterns of interaction and communicative activities involved in community collaboration have been identified. The patterns for one such activity, distance consultation, are described and modeled using techniques from the Pragmatic Web. It is also shown how patterns could inform system design.

MedView is a project that meets the challenges of evidence-based oral medicine by providing a formalisation of clinical examination data and clinical procedures. Tools are provided for knowledge acquisition, knowledge generation, visualisation and analysis of data, and knowledge sharing. The formal declarative model constitutes the main governing principle in MedView, not only in the formalisation of clinical terms and concepts, but in visualisation models and in the design and implementation of individual tools and the system as a whole as well.

In a net-based society, clinicians can come together for cooperative work and distance learning around a common medical material. This requires suitable techniques for cooperative knowledge management and user interfaces that are adapted to both the group as a whole and to individuals. To support distributed management and sharing of clinical knowledge, we propose the development of an intelligent web community for clinicians within oral medicine. This virtual meeting place will support the ongoing work on developing a digital knowledge base, providing a foundation for a more evidence-based oral medicine. The presented system is founded on the use and development of web services and standards for knowledge modelling and knowledge-based systems. The work is conducted within the frame of a well-established cooperation between oral medicine and computer science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can information technology be used to model and handle clinical knowledge in everyday work so that clinicians can more systematically learn from collected clinical data? Ontology is a crucial element in answering this question. Based on nearly ten years of clinical experience, fundamental requirements of an ontology for oral medicine are presented. The use of the proposed W3C standards RDF and OWL for the design and implementation of an ontology for oral medicine is then described and discussed. The reported work contributes to knowledge representation in oral medicine by presenting the pioneering work towards an ontology for oral medicine using RDF/OWL, thereby testing the latter on a new domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]