I think the idea of being able to add new HealthVault “Types” and sharing them across the ecosystem is really killer – having said that, the current set up doesn’t allow or facilitate this idea. The health provider portals are completely segregated from the apps, so lets say I’m NYP patient and I want to start recording my pedometer readings – I login to MyNYP.org but there is no way for me to know that there is something called WalkMe to do exactly this. So essentially its silos of systems connected through a central database.

The decentralized way of creating types on a centralized resource works great (think Wikipedia) but IMO the Semantic Web approach of people creating separate ontologies will never work – it leads to classic problems in mapping and integration.

We have our own internal set of ‘Types’ and terminologies/vocabularies that we map against incoming HealthVault data. Its easy since HealthVault sticks to standard set of vocabularies. However, I could imagine a scenario with thousands of HealthVault applications with millions of types and vocabularies. So for example you don’t want things like this

Application 1 Type: Pedometer Reading

Application 2 Type: Pedometer Count

Although they represent the same information differentiating such cases will become hard.

I think you folks are cracking the vocabulary problems elegantly at each step. Would love to hear more on this topic.