A reusable ontology for primitive and complex HL7 FHIR data types

HL7
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FHIR
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standard is a new standard aiming to offer more flexible interoperability mechanisms. We present a stand-alone RDF vocabulary as an OWL ontology that defines the primitive and complex data types of the FHIR framework, alongside their validation rules. We address the non-trivial questions of representing FHIR data types as RDF/OWL constructs in a coherent and complete manner. The proposed ontology can be used as a basic framework, where the complexity of a FHIR-based EHR is not required, while still maintaining semantic cohesion with an industrybased standard. It can also be the base for a complete representation of FHIR model as an ontology.