Ontology-based infrastructure for a meaningful EHR representation and use

Abstract

Semantic interoperability of clinical information requires their unambiguous interpretation by clinical systems. Formal ontologies provide clinical information with a formal and principles-based representation. We describe a semantic infrastructure, which consists of an OWL DL ontological framework and a set of ontology content patterns. It aims at: (1) deal with heterogeneous representations of the same clinical information and (2) allow their advanced exploitation by using description logics reasoning.