Semantic interoperability is a requirement to enable machine computable logic, inferencing, knowledge discovery, and data federation between information systems.
It is this shared vocabulary, and its associated links to an ontology, which provides the foundation and capability of machine interpretation, inference, and logic.
In healthcare, HL7 has been in use for over thirty years (which predates the internet and web technology), and uses the pipe character (|) as a data delimiter.
Whether the number of such primitive concept representations is in fact finite, or will expand indefinitely, is a question under active investigation.
The use of ontologies in supporting semantic interoperability is to provide a fixed set of concepts whose meanings and relations are stable and can be agreed to by users.
Semantic interoperability healthcare systems leverage data in a standardized way as they break down and share information.
Semantic interoperability healthcare systems leverage data in a standardized way as they break down and share information.
For example, two systems can now recognize terminology, medication symbols, and other nuances while exchanging data automatically, without human intervention.
For a particular task, one solution is to standardize a form, such as a request for payment; that request would have to encode, in standardized fashion, all of the information needed to evaluate it, such as: the agent owing the money, the agent owed the money, the nature of the action giving rise to the debt, the agents, goods, services, and other participants in that action; the time of the action; the amount owed and currency in which the debt is reckoned; the time allowed for payment; the form of payment demanded; and other information.
When two or more systems have agreed on how to interpret the information in such a request, they can achieve semantic interoperability for that specific type of transaction.
For semantic interoperability generally, it is necessary to provide standardized ways to describe the meanings of many more things than just commercial transactions, and the number of concepts whose representation needs to be agreed upon are at a minimum several thousand.
One study,[4] focusing on the lost efficiency in the communication of healthcare information, estimated that US$77.8 billion per year could be saved by implementing an effective interoperability standard in that area.
In total these numbers can be extrapolated to indicate that well over US$100 billion per year is lost because of the lack of a widely used semantic interoperability standard in the US alone.
There has not yet been a study about each policy field that might offer big cost savings applying semantic interoperability standards.
Digital transformation holds huge benefits for enabling organizations to be more efficient, more flexible, and more nimble in responding to changes in business and operating conditions.
To support this, a cross-organization expert group involving ISO/IEC JTC1, ETSI, oneM2M and W3C are collaborating with AIOTI on accelerating adoption of semantic technologies in the IoT.