Dr.Philip Shields RN BA Nursing (H1) PhD researches clinical informatics in order to understand clinical processes.
Before the recent advent of clinical informatics, my 35 year working life has been consumed by two polar-opposite roles. The first role is in the electronics/IT domain and the second role, front-line health.

In my health career, I was a rural/remote paramedic in outback Australia, and now, a front-line nurse.
In the electronics/IT role, I prototyped military robotic technology and administered large networks.

The two halves of my working life have placed me in a unique position to explore the emerging clinical informatics discipline. I explore, and bridge, uncharted ground between the two worlds of IT and health.

Here, I showcase some semantic technologies I developed.
The site was constructed 'from-scratch' with an initial idea, that is, to make semantic technologies do useful things.
To this end, the site contains five demonstrations which include an amalgam of technologies such as: Tomcat, JAVA, APACHE, Lucene, RDF, logic reasoning and OWL-DL ontologies all working together to:

1) Do simple searches in an ICD-10AM ontology
2) Use an artificial intelligence reasoner to infer new patient knowledge in a synthetic hospital ward
3) Suggest new words from the nursing terminology ontology in nursing patient notes.
4) Use JSON to calculate the fire danger index for a town.
5) Use FHIR to add and display patient details.

Ontologies may provide the following benefits in health:
Persistent organisational memory:
Ontologies are consumable knowledge which can be stored, this means, processes are not lost if a key member leaves the organisation.
Process modulation:
Ontologies may be used to add, or delete redundant processes, thus improving patient outcomes and productivity.
Instructional tool:
Ontologies may be useful as evidence to show non-clinicians where resources/money could be better placed.