W3C

– DRAFT –
FHIR RDF

15 January 2026

Attendees

Present
David Booth, Detlef Grittner, Erich Bremer, EricP, Ken Lord, Rob Hausam
Regrets
-
Chair
David Booth
Scribe
dbooth

Meeting minutes

Enhancing our FHIR RDF ontology

Ken's draft: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2026Jan/0000.html

(Ken discusses the above document)

dbooth: https://xkcd.com/927/
… I think the best way we can proceed is to not try to tackle the problem top down (eating the whole elephant), but bottom-up, incrementally adding value to our existing FHIR ont.
… Could you write up an initial use case and propose a specific ontology addition that we could consider?

ken: Yes.
… Want to address the eligibility of individuals with housing instability. Eric Jahn is very involved in this.
… There are also other use cases, not sure other people would be interested.

dbooth: Please propose them and we'll see.

ken: Natural Language Processing (NLP), an ont to define the meaning of a phrase or word might fit well.

dbooth: How would that relate to LLM successes?

ken: Each LLM has its own premises and data. The value of a shared model to train LLMs.

ken: Someone doing cancer analysis might use parts of this, but might also need a different view.

erich: What's the end game? More than an OWL ont?

ken: Yes. Company is very focused on data models. My background comes from business of modeling,

eric: What's the end game?

ken: Want to be able to say that this data element in this model is equiv to that data element in that data model.
… Different gurus have different interpretations.
… No single system has all of the data about the pt. Need to exchange data with different systems

ken: Also may want references to other models
… Should also ref schema.org

dbooth: Don't be shy about referencing other things, such as schema.org. We can partition the ont if desired, to be modular.

ken: There are things in the CMS model that are not in the FHIR model.
… What's the core starting point?

dbooth: From a practical perspective, we need to view our existing FHIR ont as our core starting point.

ken: It's very focused on clinical model. Doesn't support some of the things that are needed in this housing eligibility model, for example.

ericp: You mentioned schema.org, Eric Jahn's work. FHIR is very structural, not very ontological.

ken: FHIR is essential in clinical domain, but in social domains like housing, something called FHIR doesn't necessarily help.

ericp: We'll have use cases that w prob have subsumption, and will want clever ont, which we won't get from FHIR directly. Nothing that says medication order is related to procedure order.
… Might be able to extract some interesting stuff from v3.

rob: Yes, there's some stuff in there.
… I think a proc order is related to a med order. They follow the same pattern.

ericp: Good point. We don't capture that in the ont.
… Maybe we could extract more ont relationships from the bindings.
… The inferential value we get might help meet these use cases.

ACTION: dbooth to create an issue that describes where semantic connections are defined in FHIR

rob: There's a place in the structure def for those things

dbooth: issue created: w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf#215

ADJOURNED

Summary of action items

  1. dbooth to create an issue that describes where semantic connections are defined in FHIR
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 248 (Mon Oct 27 20:04:16 2025 UTC).

Diagnostics

Succeeded: s/Rob to/dbooth to/

No scribenick or scribe found. Guessed: dbooth

Maybe present: dbooth, eric, erich, ken, rob

All speakers: dbooth, eric, erich, ericp, ken, rob

Active on IRC: dbooth