Welcome to Iconect!

The Iconect is a website for the ICO-based clinical data analysis network, supported by a MCubed project in the University of Michigan.

Informed consent process is for getting permission before a healthcare intervention on a person is conducted. A health care provider may ask the person to consent to receive a therapy or an investigation before such a therapy or investigation is officially performed. Such a process is required for the formal conduction of a therapy, investigation (e.g., clinical trial).

For a typical health care environment such as the University of Michigan Hospital, there have been a large number of informed consent forms and processes implemented. The data and human samples related to any single informed consent process have been stored in different databases. Although each individual database is independent and makes sense by itself, there have been huge difficulties in data exchange in different databases relating to different informed consent forms and processes at various times and locations. Even we consider different hospitals and other health care environments around a whole country or the whole world, such situation is only getting worse.

The development of ICO is targeted to ontologically represent informed consent-related terms and the logical relations among these terms. Such an ontology will also represent the metadata that are used for clincal instance data representation. Therefore, the ontology also provides a way to repressent instance data which can be stored in ontology-based RDF triple store (another type of database) using the modern Semantic Web technologies.

The project is an ongoing project. You can expect more and more progress showing up here give time!

Any suggestions and comments are welcome. Thank you!