Integrating Heterogeneous Health Information Stored In Diverse Databases By Analyzing Their Metadata And Generating A Guide For Queries Evaluation

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Journal Title, Volume, Page: 
International Journal of Information Technology and Network Application - USA, Vol. 1 No. 2, 30 July, 2011
Year of Publication: 
2011
Authors: 
Amjad Hawash
Faculty Of Information Technology, An-Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine
Preferred Abstract (Original): 

Obtaining information from huge heterogeneous Health Information Systems (HIS) located in different information systems and different databases is a difficult process and could retrieve large amounts of irrelated data. Many approaches were followed to make the process easier and more accurate, each of which has its own methodology and results. This paper introduces a method for integrating diverse information especially related to HIS. The method relies on analyzing metadata for the database of every system involved in the querying process. Analyzing metadata enables retrieving data from several information systems that contain several kinds of data in their databases, and could contain the same data items that describe the same pieces of information which describe the same attributes but with different attributes titles. The result of this research is a framework able to analyze the metadata for diverse HIS databases  to guide different queries to find related data from these databases which will be reflected on the search results.