W3C

– DRAFT –
FHIR RDF

13 November 2025

Attendees

Present
David Booth, Detlef Grittner, Eric Jahn, Erich Bremer, EricP, Gaurav Vaidya, Ken Lord, Rob Hausam, Tim Prudhomme
Regrets
-
Chair
David Booth
Scribe
dbooth

Meeting minutes

Ken Lord's interest in an ontology for semantics of mapping

ken: My company provides healthcare data interop. As a basic principle, to have accurate transformations btwn data in different data models, it requires semantic equivalence.
… So we do bi-directional mappings between FHIR, X12, CCDA, and proprietary structures like CSV.
… Want to have an OWL ont that supports RDF implementations, and this can be linked to data models such as FHIR.
… This group has done a lot of good work on syntactic side. Interest or plans for semantics and classes in OWL?

ericp: I played a while ago connecting SNOMED to FHIR RDF and doing classification inference. It worked well.
… But it was hard not to overwhelm the machine, because of the size of SNOMED.
… Had to use bits of SNOMED, which means I kinda had to know the answer.
… Another useful thing would be process mgmt, such as substance request and procecure request, and make sure they don't get too old.
… Want use cases that would drive the OWL ont.
… Most would mix terminilogy w info model.

ken: THis would provide a foundation for someone doing the inference.
… Would be valuable to my work. Hope that having an ont that could span muliple data models would have value.

tim: There are multiple use cases OWL could help for.
… But your primary problem is translation or mapping data?

ken: yes. We segregate translations (at valueset level), but at the concept level it's at the transmission of one concept to another in different data models.

tim: For mapping valuesets, FHIR has concept map.

ken: We use that. But bindings of concepts to data. Need to transform the data from one concept in one data model to another concept in another data model.
… Very useful, but there are ambiguities involved. Also going across data models, having an ont at a concept level, w equiv concepts, gives you confidence in the transformation.

gaurav: I wonder if you could use LinkML to model your data, map permissible values to concepts, and use that to transform your data into RDF: https://linkml.io/linkml/schemas/enums.html
… It also has a mapping format: https://linkml.io/linkml-map/

ken: In 2008 OMG developed a model-driven message interop std.
… It was a generic approach for modeling any data model. We've adapted that for healthcare industry.
… Very confident in our operational approach. Want to add an upper ont to give people confidence.
… OMG std was MDMI

https://www.omg.org/spec/MDMI

EricJahn: Re LinkML, W3C CSV for the Web could also be used to link CSV columns to RDF contexts
… We use that. Simple way to go.

dbooth: SSSOM: mapping-commons/sssom

ken: Lots of implementation approaches can be used, but an ont could help
… We used BFO

tim: I would suggest we generate equivalence/subsumption mappings from FHIR ConceptMaps
… I mapped BFO to concept maps using prov ont.
… Planning to do that w FHIR. We have a FHIR ont.

ken: I've looked at fhir.ttl, but when it gets to semantics, e.g., BackBone class leads you to nowhere semantically.
… If there's interest in expanding that, I'd be interested.

tim: We could potentially map it to BFO. But why?

ken: For data quality. There are no computable ways to provide quality assurance around transformations.

tim: We can validate data, according to the BackBone elements. Also there are axioms for the BackBone element classes.

ericp: You want a checksum. A human said there's a mapping from x to y, and you want to verify that there is.

tim: If you're mapping X12 to FHIR, and there's something in FHIR that you've mapped to a BFO object, and you've mapped x12 to a process, and those don't link up BFO, but you would already have to have mapped x12 and FHIR to BFO.

ericp: Another use case is to drive the dev of the mapping.
… having a human in the loop, the computer could help guide the search space.

ken: But humans introduce errors, though you require them to sign off.

gaurav: I would suggest we generate equivalence/subsumption mappings from FHIR ConceptMaps

IRI stems

w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf#196

gaurav: Want David and other review on it

R6

w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf#213

ACTION: tim to do step 0: Run our R6 kindling-turtle generator and R6 kindling-shex generator using R5 structure defs and R5 XML examples to produce R5+6 turtle example and R5+6 shex shapes.

dbooth: How do you run kindling to gen a single example?

tim: It's at the bottom of our repo: w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf?tab=readme-ov-file#rdf--shex-generation
… I point it to a directory. Whatever's in there, it will try to create a Turtle version of it.

ericp: You'll want to work on Master from the FHIRcat repo.

tim: What's R6 progress? Chance for more changes?

rob: Nov 1 deadline shifted. Grahame tried to close it out in the next day or two. Locked now for Jan ballot.
… But there will definitely be another ballot.
… Two more opportunities: If there's something missing it can be a ballot comment and it can be fixed in ballot reconciliation process. But also another round of balloting.

tim: This is fixing something that should be there.

dbooth: It's a deficiency in shex, not a spec change, right?

tim: yes

tim: I figured out how to do shex for CodeableConcepts

tim: I can implement issue 198 after Jan 1

tim: w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf#167 I have a full solution for this in ShEx
… And it works for any descendent of the SNOMED concept

ADJOURNED

Summary of action items

  1. tim to do step 0: Run our R6 kindling-turtle generator and R6 kindling-shex generator using R5 structure defs and R5 XML examples to produce R5+6 turtle example and R5+6 shex shapes.
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 248 (Mon Oct 27 20:04:16 2025 UTC).

Diagnostics

Succeeded: s/interest in FHIR RDF/interest in an ontology for semantics of mapping

No scribenick or scribe found. Guessed: dbooth

Maybe present: dbooth, EricJahn, gaurav, ken, rob, tim

All speakers: dbooth, EricJahn, ericp, gaurav, ken, rob, tim

Active on IRC: dbooth