One ongoing issue in translational informatics is patient privacy and the security of data. An approach that has been pursued using semantic technologies is to encode data access rules and then check all data accesses against these policies [39]. For exam- ple,apolicycangiveahospitalbillingspecialist access to data about procedures per- formed at the hospital for the purpose of insurance billing. Then, when procedure data is requested, the requester would need to show that they were a billing specialist and provide the purpose for which they want to access the data. Semantic technologies can be and have been used to encode the policies, recognize compliance (or non-compli- ance), and explain results
