Farzad Jahedi - MD, GP, MSc (Medical IT Management) Guest lecturer of Tehran University of Medical Sciences Head of Medical Informatics in INFOVALLEY group of companies, Malaysia

80’s has been the starting era of using PC’s in the world and consequently in the medicine. By 2000 andpopularity of web 1.0, we started the new decade of web 2.0 and social web. All these evolutions in information technology have had inevitable effect on medical information systems. 2010 and the current decade is the time for web 3.0 and semantics. Effective pass through web 3.0 will, hopefully, guide us toward web 4.0; we can call it intelligent web and subsequently intelligent medical information systems. The basic components of semantics are ontology and the knowledgebase that support the required interactions. Ontology includes lexicon and a wide variety of relationships between concepts. Internationally accepted standard ontology will be an important achievement in launching global semantics for information system. This is anongoingproject with a well-known product in medicine called SNOMED-CT from International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization. Around this ontological core there are different knowledgebase standards and technologies for implementation. Knowledge engineers and informaticians have different challenges in this area. There’s a wide held belief that almost all of medical data will be managed in medical information systems in less than a decade, as we can find it out in the health care provider centers around many developed and developingcountries, but the next challenge will be optimum usage of this huge repository of information for the best healthcare services, education and research. Although already semantics has been utilized in different levels in various electronic medical records, we have long way to use it as an applied part of our e-health system. There is a need for a generalized, computable way to achievesemantic knowledgebase supporting standardmedical ontology as a naturally dynamic and relational library. Combination of semantic ontology (web 3.0), web 2.0 facilities and medical information systems(web 1.0) will give us a holistic and complete representation of a coherent body of knowledge on medical science in our foreseeable future