George Thomas recently wrote about the exciting advances in adding clinical quality linked data to Health.Data.gov. Thomas also presented on this topic at last week’s Semantic Technology Conference. Thomas writes, “In addition to making flatfiles available to download on the Web, and providing applications that enable programmatic access to backend databases through the Web, imagine using the Web itself as a database: a massively distributed, decentralized database. This is what Linked Data is about – putting data in the Web. As part of our ongoing collaboration to democratize open government data with Data.gov, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are now publishing Clinical Quality Linked Data on Health.data.gov, beginning with Hospital Compare.”

Thomas continues, “Linked Data adds an emphasis on structured data, in order to better facilitate machine processing and mashups. Open standards based schema languages are used to classify the kinds of data entities in our domain of interest, so that our Web content can be “typed” as instances of these schema classes. Links, the foundational feature of the Web of Documents, have also matured beyond just having one kind of “source page to target page” link and are now much more fine grained, allowing us to create custom relationships between the things described within our pages. We’re used to relating tables in a single database, but now we can think of Web pages as tables, and relate their data with custom links across the entire Web of Data.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Health.Data.gov