July 22, 2015 ­ TopQuadrant™, a leading enterprise metadata and semantic data integration company, announced that the VIDAL Group has implemented TopBraid Enterprise Vocabulary Net (EVN) to manage and link taxonomies used to provide patients and providers with relevant information for therapeutic decision­making.

Vidal Group, a European healthcare informatics and information systems company with products embedded in over 400 medical software applications in Europe, is committed to supporting the diverse data access requirements of physicians, pharmacists, and patients wanting up­to­date information about medications and their uses.

Jean­François Forget, MD, Vidal’s chief medical officer, commented, “Our overarching goal is to provide user­relevant information in a format that facilitates informed, efficient, effective, and economically sensible therapeutic decision­making. This requires that we execute a number of information­sorting, layering, translation, and linking tasks. In particular, it is very important that we are able to organize information from a number of perspectives and a variety of information granularities depending on a user’s specific request. Vidal has a long history of distinguishing itself by consistently satisfying a diverse customer base.”

“Our decision to redesign our information processing infrastructure into one centered around semantic technologies is based on our belief that those technologies provide us with the theoretical framework to address our users’ needs with a degree of flexibility never before possible,” says Forget. “We chose TopQuadrant because their tools enable us to transform theory into practice and to turn complex information­processing ideas into products that benefit our customers. TopQuadrant tools are, in fact, enabling us to build a semantic ecosystem in our domain of expertise.”

“We are pleased that the Vidal Group has decided to use TopBraid EVN and are confident it will serve as the cornerstone for their evolving semantic ecosystem,” said Irene Polikoff, CEO and cofounder of TopQuadrant.

VIDAL is currently using Enterprise Vocabulary Net™ (TopBraid EVN) to improve the internal management, search navigation, and semantic linking of a number of enterprise terminologies, a step that is increasing both internal consistency and efficiency as well as external re­use and enhanced delivery. TopBraid Live™ (TBL) is being used to publish EVN content to selected customers via REST APIs. Vidal has started a project using the TopBraid Tagger and its AutoClassifier to substantially improve one of its core data processing procedures by enabling semantic linking between incoming textual content and resident EVN vocabularies.

TopBraid EVN is a flexible, web­based system for managing semantic information models. It supports business stakeholders who need to collaborate on defining and linking enterprise vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies used for information integration, navigation and search.

TopBraid EVN lets organizations create, connect and use:

  • Taxonomies – Vocabularies that are based on SKOS, the W3C standard for managing taxonomies and thesauri. These information models contain hierarchies of terms connected using broader/narrower relationships. In addition to standard SKOS attributes, they can contain custom attributes and relationships.
  • Ontologies – Non­SKOS­based vocabularies. Some may contain schema­level information only—that is, definitions of classes and properties. Other ontologies may also contain instances of classes. Instance data can be hierarchical, but these hierarchies use custom relationships such as “part of” instead of broader/narrower. Using “include,” one can combine ontologies with SKOS­based taxonomies.
  • Content tag sets – Datasets that link information in one dataset with the information in another one. Typically, one of the datasets is a vocabulary whose values are used to tag information in another dataset. The dataset containing items to be tagged is often a view into a content management repository such as Microsoft SharePoint.

Learn more about TopBraid Enterprise Vocabulary Net and request an evaluation account.

About VIDAL Group

Vidal Group, a member company of AXIO Data Group, is a leading European healthcare informatics and information systems company. With a team of over 300 pharmacists, pharmacologists, physicians, researchers, health informaticists, database architects, and application developers, Vidal Group provides hospitals, primary care physicians, pharmacists, and patients across Europe with on­line access to up­to­date drug databases and related treatment­based information. The Vidal Group team utilizes their collective expertise to provide relevant content from regulatory agencies, drug development organizations, and peer­reviewed journals. The company’s products are currently embedded in over 400 medical software applications in Europe. Vidal Group is headquartered in Paris. It has local operations in a number of European countries including France, Germany, and Spain. Vidal Group has recently expanded its sales to Latin America (Mexico and Chile) and the Middle East (UAE and KSA). http://vidal­group.net/

About TopQuadrant

TopQuadrant’s standards­based solutions enable organizations to evolve their information infrastructure into a semantic ecosystem, the foundation for intelligent business capabilities and integrated big data. As a result, data can be organized, shared and exchanged regardless of its structure, origin or location. TopBraid Enterprise Vocabulary Net™ supports collaborative management of enterprise metadata, models, business glossaries and taxonomies used in search, content navigation and data integration. TopBraid Reference Data Manager™ supports the governance and provisioning of reference data, including the enrichment of reference datasets (code lists) with comprehensive metadata. TopBraid Insight™ is a semantic virtual data warehouse that enables federated querying of data across diverse data sources as if they were in one place. TopQuadrant customers include many government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies in numerous industries including pharmaceutical, financial services, energy and digital media. For more information, visit http://www.topquadrant.com

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