Health-RI: Semantic Interoperability

Welcome to the official documentation site for semantic interoperability within the Health-RI ecosystem.

This site serves as a central resource for: - Understanding what semantic interoperability is and why it matters, - Learning about ontologies and ontology engineering approaches, - Exploring OntoUML and gUFO, the modeling foundations selected for our efforts, - Documenting the method developed and applied at Health-RI to achieve semantic integration across datasets and systems.

About Health-RI

Health-RI is a national initiative in the Netherlands dedicated to building an integrated infrastructure for health and life sciences data. By improving data sharing, reuse, and accessibility, Health-RI aims to empower researchers, clinicians, and policymakers to accelerate data-driven healthcare innovation.

Semantic interoperability plays a foundational role in this mission by ensuring that data from diverse sources can be aligned and understood consistently — not just technically, but conceptually.

What You'll Find Here

This site documents Health-RI's efforts to enable semantic interoperability in health data by providing foundational concepts, modeling techniques, and methodological guidance. It is designed to support researchers, data stewards, and engineers working to align data meaningfully across systems.

• Semantic Interoperability: Key principles and motivations behind semantic interoperability.
• OntoUML & gUFO: Ontologically grounded modeling tools and their application in semantic infrastructures.
• The Health-RI Method: A structured approach for creating reference models and mappings in collaborative environments.