W3C

– DRAFT –
FHIR RDF

24 July 2025

Attendees

Present
David Booth, Eric Jahn, EricP, Gaurav Vaidya, Jim Balhoff, Rita Torkzadeh, Tim Prudhomme
Regrets
-
Chair
David Booth
Scribe
dbooth

Meeting minutes

INtros

ericP: Long tie RDF geek

gaurav: Semantic web technologist at U of NC

jim: Also at U of NC. We've been contributing to FHIR RDF through a grant under Mayo clinic. Done a lot of bio ontology work.

tim: Healthcare software dev. Strong interest in ont and RDF. Working for Firely.

erich: Work at Stonybrook U, long time RDF boy. Been working on a DICOM RDF represesntation. Also int in FHIR RDF.

eric-jhan: Interop arch at BitFocus. Moving heaviliy into OWL. Implementing FHIR more and more. Also int in how FHIR and other RDF representations relate. Been following since 2014.

Rita_Torkzadeh: On a call w Brian Pech and David Booth before. Int in DICOM RDF rep.

DBooth: Started this FHIR RDF effort with EricP and others.

w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf#120

ericP: canonical and Reference don't use the same resolution path.
… They requred differnet kinds of queries.
… We invented fhir:link
… RDF itself does not have relative URLs, but each RDF format does.
… So in converting them to abolute URIs, we had to prepend a base with "../"
… Values of FHIR "uri", "url" and "canonical" types need to have a fhir:link generated as an RDF node, like <http://example.org/fhir/..foo>
… There was a debate about how to do this with Reference.

(Jim shows code changes he did to implement this)
… Something like "uri" needs a prefix added, to be absolute.

ericP: Not sure that profiles are being generated properly anyway, so I suggest disableing profile generation of examples.

dbooth: Does the problem only appear in profiles?

jim: I will check.

ericP: I noticed that MolecularDefinition has a problem.
… Wonder how example errors are handled in the FHIR build

dbooth: Would be good if there's an error in an example, to generate an RDF example with a comment saying the example could not be generated due to an error in the original.

dbooth: Should ask the other FHIR folks what to do if an error is found in an exampe.

ValueSet bindings for ontology & validation #167

w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf#167

tim: This has a valueset binding.
… ValueSets are not yet linked to Code systems, but adding fhir:link would handle that.
… Wouldn't be able use OWL to validate, becuase of OWA, but ShEx could validate it.
… Right now the shex only says it needs to be CodeablConcept.
… Could improved the shex to check it.
… But would probably be worth putting it into the ontology.
… Also related to another issue: 168

w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf#168

tim: When you define a valueset, you can do it w a rule.
… E.g., if you have a code here, it needs to be a descendent of a SNOMED code.
… Would be nice to represent the descendant rel as an RDF subclass rel.
… That would allow OWL to do valueset expansion.

tim: For finding the rel, OWL could do that. But for validation shex would still be needed, for CWA.

ericP: I don't think you'll get validation without connecting to a terminology server.
… Could use a semantic action to talk to a terminology server.

tim: Could put this into FHIR R6. They want R6 changes by Nov 2025.

ericP: The addition of fhir:link breaks a lot of my shex code. Want to consider changing the name of fhir:link to fhir:n .

ACTION: EricP to make a new issue for that

ADJOURNED

Summary of action items

  1. EricP to make a new issue for that
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 244 (Thu Feb 27 01:23:09 2025 UTC).

Diagnostics

No scribenick or scribe found. Guessed: dbooth

Maybe present: DBooth, eric-jhan, erich, gaurav, jim, Rita_Torkzadeh, tim

All speakers: DBooth, eric-jhan, erich, ericP, gaurav, jim, Rita_Torkzadeh, tim

Active on IRC: dbooth