From Healthcare Messaging Standard to Semantic Web Service Description: Generating WSMO Annotation from HL7 with Mapping-Based Approach

In healthcare IT environment there are disparate functional systems and they need to collaborate to support healthcare enterprise workflow. While messaging standard and service-oriented approach provides general interoperability practice, they lack sufficient support for semantic interoperability. Semantic web service technology has proved useful to improve semantic interoperability by annotating service interfaces with domain ontologies in the healthcare domain. However, current approaches rely on ad-hoc manual effort to define semantic annotation and there lacks a generalized, cost-effective approach to automatically generate semantic web service descriptions from domain knowledge to ensure consistency and interoperability. In this paper, we propose a mapping-based approach to utilize healthcare domain knowledge to reduce the effort of manually creating semantic annotation. Specifically, we establish modeling ontology for Health Level 7 (HL7) messaging standard and define its semantic mapping to Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). A use case illustrates generating WSMO service annotation using this mapping with HL7 standard model as input. This mapping allows separation of concern and enables automatic annotation, and thus eases introducing semantic technology into healthcare environment unfamiliar with semantics.