“The Yosemite Project … lays out a roadmap for leveraging RDF in support of making all structured healthcare information semantically interoperable. … “The approach we have taken in the VA and that of the Yosemite Project is aligned in terms of focusing strictly on semantics, rather than on the syntax, packaging, presentation, and transport,” says [Dr. Rafael] Richards. “Current healthcare standards address these latter components already, but not the semantics issue.” The Yosemite Project and its recommendation to use a schema-flexible model to facilitate the meshing of multiple different models is precisely the approach the VA has taken, he explains. To that end, Richards has aligned data sources for vital signs from different systems by projecting the VistA NoSQL M DB database native schema to RDF, and translating FHIR’s XML and LOINC’s CSV representations to RDF. He uses TopQuadrant’s SPINMap to map one model to another using SPARQL Inferencing Notation (SPIN) and run automated RDF rules. ”
