A socio-technical perspective on ontology development in healthGrids

The paper focuses on the alignment of technical and human infrastructures in the semantic web, taking the development and alignment of ontologies in eHealth as a vehicle for exploring the barriers to achieving this. The authors report on the outcomes of a recent eScience workshop looking at data integration and ontology alignment across Grid projects in the same disease domain. It is premised on a view of Grids as socio-technical systems aligning technical and human networks in ways which can create useful synergies, but may also work at cross purposes, generating unpredicted costs and risks and barriers. 1. Socio-technical Alignment The eHealth vision of large-scale, seamless data-sharing for research and clinical trials faces real barriers in the development of shared infrastructures for collecting, coding, cleaning and representing data across multiple distributed communities of practice. Ontology development is a significant strand in that vision