Blending FHIR RDF and OWL

HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is rapidly becoming a major standard for the exchange of electronic healthcare information. FHIR defines a collection of “resources” to represent di erent information types and specifies how these resources are to be exchanged using XML, JSON and, as of the latest release, RDF. The FHIR specification also uses links to SNOMED CT and other ontologies as an integral component of the representation of clinical data. The combination of a standardized set of FHIR RDF tags with embedded ontology references o ers a number of interesting new possibilities for classification and categorization of clinical data, including recognizing prescriptions that contain particular drug categories, procedures that use a specific technique or approach, diagnoses of general disease categoreis (e.g. cancer, diabetes), etc. In this paper we investigate how FHIR RDF can be combined with ontologies in a description logic reasoner to achieve these goals.