Tool for Dynamically Integrating Military and Civilian telemedicine and Medical Informatics systems for Homeland Security

There is no established standard in sharing data between various medical record systems. Thus the integration and sharing of data between systems has been difficult. Nevertheless, most medical databases nowadays use commercial database engines (e.g. oracle) as their backend. These commercial database engines support data exchange through XML. Thus provide us with a mean to exchange data between systems. The obstacle in exchanging data between systems lies in the schematic and semantic difference between databases. Here we propose using XQuery technology to overcome the schematic differences and using UMLS to overcome the semantic differences. The result is a data integration system that is flexible and can be easily configured to adapt to various database backends and application frontends. In order to minimize the learning curve necessary to master XQuery programming, automatic generation of XQuery scripts will be added to thhe system.