ARGOS policy brief on semantic interoperability

Semantic interoperability requires the use of standards, not only for Electronic Health Record (EHR) data to be transferred and structurally mapped into a receiving repository, but also for the clinical content of the EHR to be interpreted in conformity with the original meanings intended by its authors. Accurate and complete clinical documentation, faithful to the patient’s situation, and interoperability between systems, require widespread and dependable access to published and maintained collections of coherent and quality-assured semantic resources, including models such as archetypes and templates that would (1) provide clinical context, (2) be mapped to interoperability standards for EHR data, (3) be linked to well specified, multi-lingual terminology value sets, and (4) be derived from high quality ontologies. Wide-scale engagement with professional bodies, globally, is needed to develop these clinical information standards

Semantic and pragmatic interoperability: a model for understanding

In this paper we present a conceptual model for understanding of semantic and pragmatic interoperability. We use the model to identify and classify the possible semantic interoperability problems

Semantic Interoperability of Geospatial Ontologies: A Model-theoretic Analysis

People sometimes misunderstand each other, even when they use the same language to communicate. Often these misunderstandings happen when people use the same words to mean different things, in effect disagreeing about meanings. This thesis investigates such disagreements about meaning, considering them to be issues of semantic interoperability. This thesis explores semantic interoperability via a particular formal framework used to specify people’s conceptualizations of a given domain. This framework is called an ‘ontology,’ which is a collection of data and axioms written in a logical language equipped with a modeltheoretic semantics. The domain under consideration is the geospatial domain. Specifically, this thesis investigates to what extent two geospatial ontologies are semantically interoperable when they ‘agree’ on the meanings of certain basic terms and statements, but ‘disagree’ on others. This thesis defines five levels of semantic interoperability that can exist between two ontologies. Each of these levels is, in turn, defined in terms of six ‘compatibility conditions,’ which precisely describe how the results of queries to one ontology are compatible with the results of queries to another ontology. Using certain assumptions of finiteness, the semantics of each ontology is captured by a finite number of models, each of which is also finite. The set of all models of a given ontology is called its model class. The five levels of semantic interoperability are proven to correspond exactly to five particular relationships between the model classes of the ontologies. The exact level of semantic interoperability between ontologies can in some cases be computed; in other cases a heuristic can be used to narrow the possible levels of semantic interoperability. The main results are: (1) definitions of five levels of semantic interoperability based on six compatibility conditions; (2) proofs of the correspondence between levels of semantic interoperability and the model-class relation between two ontologies; and (3) a method for computing, given certain assumptions of finiteness, the exact level of semantic interoperability between two ontologies. These results define precisely, in terms of models and queries, the often poorly defined notion of semantic interoperability, thus providing a touchstone for clear definitions of semantic interoperability elsewhere

Perspectives in Semantic Interoperability

This paper describes the problem of semantic technology interoperability from two different perspectives. First, from a theoretical perspective by presenting an overview of the different factors that affect interoperability and, second, from a practical perspective by reusing evaluation methods and applying them to six current semantic technologies in order to assess their interoperability

The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data

The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data (i~HD, www.i-hd.eu) has been formed as one of the key sustainable entities arising from the Electronic Health Records for Clinical Research (IMI-JU-115189) and SemanticHealthNet (FP7-288408) projects, in collaboration with several other European projects and initiatives supported by the European Commission. i~HD is a European not-for-profit body, registered in Belgium through Royal Assent. i~HD has been established to tackle areas of challenge in the successful scaling up of innovations that critically rely on high-quality and interoperable health data. It will specifically address obstacles and opportunities to using health data by collating, developing, and promoting best practices in information governance and in semantic interoperability. It will help to sustain and propagate the results of health information and communication technology (ICT) research that enables better use of health data, assessing and optimizing their novel value wherever possible. i~HD has been formed after wide consultation and engagement of many stakeholders to develop methods, solutions, and services that can help to maximize the value obtained by all stakeholders from health data. It will support innovations in health maintenance, health care delivery, and knowledge discovery while ensuring compliance with all legal prerequisites, especially regarding the insurance of patient's privacy protection. It is bringing multiple stakeholder groups together so as to ensure that future solutions serve their collective needs and can be readily adopted affordably and at scale

Biomedical Terminologies and Ontologies: Enabling Biomedical Semantic Interoperability and Standards in Europe

In the management of biomedical data, vocabularies such as ontologies and terminologies (O/Ts) are used for (i) domain knowledge representation and (ii) interoperability. The knowledge representation role supports the automated reasoning on, and analysis of, data annotated with O/Ts. At an interoperability level, the use of a communal vocabulary standard for a particular domain is essential for large data repositories and information management systems to communicate consistently with one other. Consequently, the interoperability benefit of selecting a particular O/T as a standard for data exchange purposes is often seen by the end-user as a function of the number of applications using that vocabulary (and, by extension, the size of the user base). Furthermore, the adoption of an O/T as an interoperability standard requires confidence in its stability and guaranteed continuity as a resource

Grids and the Virtual Observatory

We consider several projects from astronomy that benefit from the Grid paradigm and associated technology, many of which involve either massive datasets or the federation of multiple datasets. We cover image computation (mosaicking, multi-wavelength images, and synoptic surveys); database computation (representation through XML, data mining, and visualization); and semantic interoperability (publishing, ontologies, directories, and service descriptions)