Converting RIM/CDA to Ontology for Semantic Web Reasoning

In the COI test case, we need to access patient data stored in electronic patient records (EPR), express their meanings and relationship clearly according to respective web ontology (OWL/RDF) in order to carry out the reasoning (i.e. eligibility for clinical trials).

HL7 RIM/CDA has been one of proposed standards with which the patient clinical data and various healthcare events are recorded and communicated in EPR systems.

Here we list some efforts of converting RIM/CDA to ontology for semantic web reasoning

Rector, Qamar and Marley

Detailed Models Collaborative mentioned that under a consultancy constract with NHS, Alan Rector and Tom Marley have OWL-ized a significant subset of NHS messages and message fragments. Their methodology is reported in the paper Binding Ontologies and Coding Systems to Electronic Health Records and Messages. It is also said "Tom is preparing an OWL ITS of the HL7 RIM and data types based on this work". If permission is obtained, this can be a good candidate for the information model of COI demonstrator.

Helen

Two years back, I did some exercises on building an RDF/OWL version of RIM and RMIM semantics for semantic web reasoning. This model is by no means complete. While waiting for Alan Rector's reply to our inquery about sharing his RIM OWL file, I am using this RIM-OWL version to express the patient data outlined in COI use case.

RIMOWL ontology

Some of the issues and design considerations when building this ontology are captured here

During her master degree study at Dalhousie University, Anju Sharma made a mapping of CDA XSD to OWL, and made a VB program that converts CDA documents to OWL according to the above RIMOWL ontology and CDA owl ontology. An example of CDA owl file can be found here.

This presentation explains some main constructs of RIMOWL ontology and CDA ontology and how the mock patient data can be expressed.