Use of OWL-based tools to aid message development and maintenance.

The National Health Service National Programme for Information Technology is currently developing messaging standards to make available key information about an individual patient's care across and within different health-care settings. The complexity of this task makes it imperative that adequate tooling support is made available so as to aid consistency of design, implementation, conformance testing, and maintenance. Connecting for Health commissioned a proof of concept study to investigate whether the Object Web Language (OWL) and its associated tools could provide a basis for the message development and implementation environments. This study indicated that OWL is very much suited to such a task and should be seriously considered.