Ontology-Based Data Modeling for NoSQL Databases: A Case Study in e-Healthcare Application

With the advent of e-healthcare applications, managing health data manually is no longer possible. Health data being voluminous, complex in nature and generally described with specialized terminologies, requires to be specified with standards like ISO EN13606RM, openEHR, HL7, etc. for reference implementation and data storage. These standards are not completely interoperable and cannot fit to sensor data, cloud and database implementation for various requirements. Thus, a generic ontology is necessary to accommodate basic clinical care. This paper first proposes one such ontology and describes the process of development of the ontology as suggested in the literature. Next, the paper also proposes an algorithm which uses a domain ontology and a set of queries to output the design of a NoSQL data store. The ontology developed in the paper is used by the proposed algorithm to output a NoSQL design for storing semi-structured and unstructured healthcare data. The performance of the algorithm is also analyzed theoretically using the NoSQL database schema generated for healthcare domain.