Jim wrote: "Like it or not, they were probably thinking of HL7 and ISO 21090. We would need to show how semweb solutions are a better solution, or how it is tied too much to healthcare, leaving out life sciences, population science, chemistry, etc. We don't yet have *a* solution for this, we have several. :-) "
Besides the fact that HL7 et al. are already better established in the current healthcare IT infrastructure than RDF/OWL, it does not seem too hard to come up with reasonable arguments in favour of RDF/OWL. I also read other seemingly RDF-friendly pieces of text in that document: "As mentioned, ONC's CDA is a foundational step in the right direction. However, the thrust of CDA seems largely that it be an extensible wrapper that can hold a variety of structured reports or documents, each with vocabulary controlled metadata. While this shares many features with the universal exchange language that we envisage, it lacks many others. In particular, it perpetuates the record centric notion that data elements should "live" inside documents (albeit metadata tagged). We think that a universal exchange language must facilitate the exchange of metadata tagged elements at a more atomic and disaggregated level, so that their varied assembly into documents or reports can itself be a robust, entrepreneurial marketplace of applications. In a similar vein, we view the semantics of metadata tags as an arena in which new players can participate (by "publishing"), not as one limited to a vocabulary controlled by the government" Cheers, Matthias Samwald // DERI Galway, Ireland // Information Retrieval Facility, Austria // http://samwald.info
