The concept of semantic interoperability is becoming increasingly important in the health and research fields, particularly in areas where data is scarce and precious such as rare and paediatric diseases. As Information Technology plays an ever increasing role in both healthcare and clinical research, it can act as an enabler to more efficient and standardized collection of various types of data, but also, in the right circumstances, can facilitate the sharing, pooling or querying of data. Myriad software solutions exist to capture and process health and research-relevant data – to allow these disparate eHealth and eResearch systems and tools to ‘speak’ to one another (without the need for very time-consuming and costly human data integration activity), some degree of interoperability is necessary.
The report can be freely accessed here.
