An OWL-DL ontology for the HL7 reference information model

Abstract

Representing knowledge via building an ontology for healthcare messages is important to achieve semantic interoperability among healthcare information systems and to better execute decision-support systems. HL7, an ANSI-accredited developing organization, developed the most widely-used messaging standard in healthcare information systems. This messaging standard, in its version 3, is based on an object-oriented model called the Reference Information Model (RIM). In this paper, a description logic-based ontology in Web Ontology Language for HL7-RIM is proposed. This proposed ontology is used to instantiate medical records written in HL7, and also has been used to reason a sample medical rule. The evaluation results show that the ontology can capture necessary clinical information elements and can be used successfully by decision-support systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.