Harmonization Process for Quality Assurance of the Review
To ensure a wide definition of metadata, various research fields (including social science, geography, and bibliography) were investigated for metadata applications, focusing on the described problems, provided solutions, and their transferability to the field of medical informatics. Thus, a precisely defined harmonized understanding of the term “metadata” would therefore be indispensable for current and future developments in all aspects of data integration. The review’s focus and the proposed research questions were driven by the issues and misunderstanding experiences on a daily basis in our intersectoral projects. To close this knowledge gap, we performed an expert review using the literature from the last decade. To our knowledge, there exists no analysis on these concepts found in the current literature.
It appears that domain experts providing clinical metadata and metadata experts have different definitions and boundaries of 2 central metadata concepts: the definition of the metadata itself and metadata composition (like matching, mapping, and transformation). The harmonization aspect, which was intended to be solved by using metadata, resulted in another form of heterogeneity instead of a solution for missing interoperability. The problem is the variety of definitions, formats, standards, and contexts, which leads to a vague understanding of the actual metadata itself. However, from current experiences, the definition of the term “metadata” is far from clear and very nonuniformly applied in everyday life. An important aspect of the research is the proposed findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability principles by Wilkinson et al, which are clear guidelines for the association of data and metadata. The unambiguous and precise definition of metadata is crucial and is increasingly becoming a focus of active research. It serves various use cases in different research areas, for example, data identification, classification, retrieval, and data set validation. Metadata are created for a detailed and unique description of the corresponding data. Metadata can support the integration of heterogeneous data sources to achieve a valid and meaningful data fusion, enabling a comprehensible reuse of the stored medical information.
Owing to the missing exchange, data formats will differ, creating data heterogeneity, which is a well-discussed issue in computer science. This information is primarily created to document patient care for legal or financial purposes and is often stored in silos, consequently making it hard to reach and impossible to reuse. An immense amount of data fuels this digital revolution, and it is desperately needed for specialized procedures to be developed and optimized. Computer-aided medicine is revolutionizing health care and is creating treatment possibilities that are unimaginable without computer assistance: personalized medicine, improved diagnostics by artificial intelligence, and robot-assisted surgery.
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