Ensuring Semantic Interoperability for e-Health Applications

Abstract

The exchange of information between heterogeneous and distributed health information systems preserving the semantics is an important open issue for the health care sector. In this paper, we propose an approach that, exploiting the Semantic Web technologies, has the objective of allowing semantic interoperability among software agents for e-Health applications that preserves, not only the semantic of transmitted messages, but also the subjectivity of agent's world vision in the communication The proposed approach exploits the Semantic Triangle Model to differentiate the roles of referents (real world objects) and concepts (mental image or impression about a real object) in the communication process and ensures an effective semantic interoperability without the need of a unique shared conceptualization.