Over the last years medical-data-models.org has accumulated Europe's largest medical metadata-repository, amounting to roughly 24.000 semantically annotated data collection artifacts from clinical studies and routine documentation.
The need arose from the awareness of low resource settings of clinical researchers in non-westernised countries, a drive for empowerment of good clinical practice and regulatory compliance in non-industry-funded clinical trials and a desire to harmonise global medical data through semantically structuring in fully specified machine-readable formats.
A rough estimate of 40 working years of medical domain knowledge was put into the database back-end driving the semantic search. We achieve harmonisation through reuse of concepts. (Groß et al. 2016 "A Reuse-Based Annotation Approach for Medical Documents").
Sharing the resulting resource under CC-BY attribution along with tools to a broad community will continue to establish a public domain infrastructure. However, time consuming input of domain expertise, idealistic property claims on metadata from corporate/private players and limited resources in the academic sector jeopardise the scalability and sustainability of the public platform.
In this talk we will try to outline the basic scientific premiss to the initiative, our currently reached milestones, and some strategic alliances with other similar initiatives across the globe.
After this, a discussion with the audience will collectively develop the idea further, give criticism from different domains and create a shared vision for the future of this concept in the next digital era.