Semantic Exchange of Medicinal Data: A Way Towards Open Healthcare Systems

Recently several organizations in the healthcare sector have produced standards and representation forms using XML. However, the introduction of these XML-based technologies is not enough to provide a means to interpret the semantics of the exchanged messages. Instead communicating medicinal information systems are hard-coded to only work together. As a result extending the systems by new parties as well as introducing new message types is inconvenient typically requiring long lasting standardization processes. How to replace hard-coded medicinal information systems by the open healthcare information systems that support semantic interoperability, are extensible and maintainable is the topic of this paper. In particular, we described our work on using RDF-statements in exchanging messages. In such a setting, the semantics of the exchanged data is available with the data, which makes the data machine processable. We also describe how communicating medicinal information systems can use XSLT-transformations in picking out their needed information from the exchanged messages.