Lectures

In many highly regulated industries, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, controlled vocabularies are state of the art. In addition, companies usually provide their own terminology. Both internal and standard vocabularies can refer to different concepts and are subject to change over time.

This situation often makes it a Herculean task to compare terms and/or concepts, update vocabularies, track changes and finally use controlled vocabularies for downstream processes such as information retrieval and information provision. For example, a content management system may contain tags from previous versions of the vocabulary, and users need to de-reference these labels or track their lifecycle.

In this presentation, we will show how we solved these challenges for an industrial partner in the pharmaceutical industry with its high demands on data quality and the validation of systems and processes. We will show how we combined public and self-created ontologies, integrated vocabularies from different sources and integrated versioning mechanisms based on PROV-O into our knowledge model. In addition, we show how a query module is integrated into the customer’s workflows, which forms the basis for future applications such as auto-classification, information retrieval and intelligent information provision.