PANACEA: Development of knowledge representation structures and inference techniques for an integrated semantic enabled recommendation system for pharmaceutical data. Across the medical field, it is common to encounter mismatches of terms used in medical practice, whose domains often follow different terminologies. This, apart from that it makes very difficult to share and reuse existing knowledge, is hampering the development of integrated information systems and applications that enable effective management. Recognizing the criticality of the issue, the international scientific community promotes unique encoding schemes through the development of relevant standards such as ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases) and UNII (Unique Ingredient Identifier). Leveraging these standards, the company Ergobyte SA, specialized in medical software, implemented the drug guide "GALINOS", which includes indications, contraindications and interactions of compounds, Summary of Product Characteristics (SPC) and Patient Information Leaflet (PIL) thus building a knowledge base unprecedented for the Greek medical area. Targeting the transition from mere information into knowledge and support to the user in making complex decisions, the project “PANACEA” aims to develop an integrated system for management and exploitation of health information at semantic level.

In particular, “PANACEA” aims to build an intelligent recommendation system to effectively propose drug therapies that will support and facilitate health professionals, ensuring faster and safer administration of drugs. For this purpose, “PANACEA” will make use of Semantic Web technologies for the formal representation of the involved knowledge and to provide automated inference.

For building the knowledge base, part of the medical knowledge will be available from appropriate transformations and editing of existing medical data that are provided by Ergobyte SA. Furthermore, specially developed interface will allow the further enrichment and introduction of new knowledge, while also controlling the overall coherence and consistency of the new knowledge. At the core of the project lies the semantic inference engine, analyzing requests to the knowledge base and providing relevant suggestions and recommendations. As the volume of the involved knowledge imposes requirements on a large scale, emphasis will be given on developing appropriate reasoning methodologies to ensure the efficiency of the system in terms of responsiveness. Finally, a graphical user interface for interaction with the system will be developed which will apply all the needed semantic transformations in a manner transparent to the user.

By providing an integrated recommendation system for medical content data that supports all stages of development, verification and management of the involved semantic knowledge, the project "PANACEA" provides essential assistance for achieving high levels of care, while promoting interoperability and integration of knowledge.