Linked Open Data for Medical Institutions and Drug Availability Lists in Macedonia

Abstract

One of the most active fields of research in the past decade has been data representation, storage and retrieval. With the vast amount of data available on the Web, this field has initiated the development of data management techniques for distributed datasets over the existing infrastructure of the Web. The Linked Data paradigm is one of them, and it aims to provide common practices for publishing and linking data on the Web with the use of Semantic Web technologies. This allows for a transformation of the Web from a web of documents, to a web of data. With this, the Web becomes a distributed network for data access, usable by software agents and machines. The interlinked nature of the distributed datasets provides new use-case scenarios for the end users, scenarios which are unavailable over isolated datasets. In this paper, we are describing the process of generating Linked Open Data from the public data of the Health Insurance Fund along with data from the Associated Pharmacies of Macedonia. With this we generate and publish an interlinked RDF dataset in a machine-readable format. We also provide examples of newly available use-case scenarios which exploit the Linked Data format of the data. These use-cases can be used by applications and services for providing relevant information to the end-users. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.