KConnect (Khresmoi Multilingual Medical Text Analysis, Search and Machine Translation Connected in a Thriving Data-Value Chain) aims to create a medical text Data-Value Chain with a critical mass of participating companies using cutting-edge commercial cloud-based services for multilingual Semantic Annotation, Semantic Search and Machine Translation for Electronic Health Records and medical publications.
Contact: Todor Primov
Project Overview
The commercial cloud-based services will be the result of productisation of the multilingual medical text processing tools developed in the Khresmoi FP7 project, allowing wide adoption of these tools by industry. The critical mass will be created by the KConnect Professional Services Community, which will consist of at least 30 companies by the end of the project. These companies will be trained to build solutions based on the KConnect Services, hence serving as multipliers for commercial exploitation of the KConnect services.The KConnect project will facilitate the straightforward adaptation of the commercialised services to new languages by providing toolkits enabling the adaptation to be done by by people having a software engineering skill set, as opposed to the rarer language engineering skill set.
The KConnect services will also be adapted to handle text in Electronic Health Records, which is particularly challenging due to misspellings, neologisms, organisation-specific acronyms, and heavy use of negation and hedging. The consortium is driven by a core group of four innovative SMEs following complementary business perspectives related to medical text analysis and search. These companies will build solutions for their customers based on KConnect technology. Two partners from the medical domain will use KConnect services to solve their medical record analysis challenges. Two highly-used medical search portal providers will implement the KConnect services to innovate the services offered by their search portals. Through these search portals, the KConnect technologies will be used by over 1 million European citizens before the end of the project.
Ontotext’s Role
The main role of Ontotext in the project is one of a system integrator. First, the KConnect Cloud Market platform will be developed on top of the existing S4 infrastructure (from the AnnoMarket and DaPaaS projects). An AWS-oriented cloud service, the Cloud Market will be the meeting ground of the services offered by the technology providers in the consortium (Machine Translation, Semantic Search, Knowledge Base, Text Analytics, etc.). The Cloud Market hides the complexity of those services’ deployment, autoscaling, access control, quota management, etc. That way developers of vertical solutions in the consortium will be able to use these technologies directly via their REST API in less than two minutes. To satisfy the additional requirement for local installation of those services for some of the project’s use cases, Ontotext will provide the expertise in packaging the services in the form of Docker images.
Another role of Ontotext is to provide popular public medical datasets as linked data imported in a GraphDB triplestore building upon Khresmoi’s Knowledge base and adapting it to the needs of KConnect. The updated version of the data will include new datasets (especially ones used for information extraction of chemical entities) and existing datasets in new languages (e.g. UMLS subsets in Swedish and Hungarian).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644753.