Semantic Interoperability of Medical Information Systems

A friend of mine sent me a link reporting about the Artemis Project, which is described as a A Semantic Web Service-based P2P Infrastructure for the Interoperability of Medical Information Systems. Quite a mouthful. There’s a good introductory PowerPoint presentation as well. They’ve done a good job taking all the stuff we’ve been working on in the semantic web workgroups and applied it directly to healthcare data interoperability through web services standards. Of course, we know that HL7 has been around for while and it works well for pure exchange of information but without semantics (meaning) it’s only useful up to a point. Artemis seems to be a great start in trying to exchange the meaning of data in additional to the data itself.

I plan to take a deeper look soon and report back on whether it might be useful in a production capacity or if it’s just an academic and pilot exercise right now. My guess is that it’s the latter (from what I can see right now). But the ideas they’re espousing, while not new, are certainly useful.