W3C

– DRAFT –
FHIR RDF

25 September 2025

Attendees

Present
David Booth, Detlef Grittner, Eric Jahn, Erich Bremer, EricP, Gaurav Vaidya, Jim Balhoff, Tim Prudhomme
Regrets
-
Chair
David Booth
Scribe
dbooth

Meeting minutes

Issues list

https://github.com/w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf/issues

dbooth: Should the shex and/or owl be considered authoritative?

AGREED: View shex as authoritative iff FHIR views xml schema as authoritative

dbooth: What about owl?

gaurav: owl should be authoritative unless it conflicts

detlef: Might be hard to get owl to a reliable level

ericp: shex is authoritative for content model, owl is authoritative for inference, rdf page describes the mapping that shex gives you ....
… Like in W3C you need two independent impls
… I don't think any format pages for FHIR have made the claim that you only need to read one page.
… Format pages give a flavor of what to do, and additional rules, but a valid doc is almost entirely defined by the schema, modulo semantics that need to be expressed in prose

dbooth: So a valid piece of fhir rdf needs to conform to rdf page prose, shex and owl

ericp: But anything that conforms to the shex will conform to the owl.

tim: w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf#176

tim: They want to make R6 as backward and forward compatible as possible.
… If we were to make changes to the OWL or shex after R6, that would break usage of OWL or shex, then that would go against the idea of it being "normative" maturity level.
… That's why I thought, for R6, we should ensure that any new changes would be backward and forward compatible.

ericp: If we make something inconsistent, can we do bug fixes?

tim: I think so. Look at what was done for R5. They did new releases, like v4.01

dbooth: If something in the spec is mutually inconsistent, it would have to be fixable.

tim: Shex doesn't have a full representation of valueset bindings.
… If we add that, technically it adds constraints to previous versions, but it's more consistent w FHIR.

tim: We're changing fhir:link to fhir:l . That's a big change. Should get that into R6, and not change it after R6.

ericp: Adding constraints to shex breaks existing invalid RDF.

dbooth: agreed.

tim: The real breaking changes are things like fhir:link to fhir:l , and any turtle serializations.

AGREED: Focus on turtle changes and consequent shex and owl changes for R6, and other shex and owl enhancements are lower priority for R6

dbooth: Needing update: examples (Jim done, but not yet PR), shex, owl, HAPI.

tim: I can do the shex and the owl generation.

ericp: I tried to do a test suite with a few FHIR resources with some datatypes and exploit most of the struct def functionality.

ericp: I can do HAPI

ADJOURNED

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 244 (Thu Feb 27 01:23:09 2025 UTC).

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No scribenick or scribe found. Guessed: dbooth

Maybe present: AGREED, dbooth, detlef, gaurav, tim

All speakers: AGREED, dbooth, detlef, ericp, gaurav, tim

Active on IRC: dbooth