Call for Participation in Unified Care Model Community Group
The Unified Care Model Community Group has been launched:
Organizations involved in healthcare, social care, housing, justice, education, and other human-service domains increasingly need to exchange, integrate, and reason over information that spans multiple care domains. While many standards, information models, and ontologies exist, they are often developed independently and reflect different perspectives, assumptions, and semantic structures. As a result, organizations face significant challenges in achieving semantic interoperability, whole-person care coordination, integrated analytics, AI-enabled reasoning, and the development of applications that require semantically consistent information across domains. The solution to this problem is described as Whole Person Care.
The mission of the group is to develop an open, computable semantic cross-domain framework for care domains that enables semantic interoperability and equivalence across healthcare, social care, housing, justice, education, and related human-service ecosystems. The group will develop the Unified Care Model (UCM), a high-level ontology and semantic reference model that can be used to semantically align and bridge domain-specific information models, ontologies, and standards. It is not a goal to replace existing standard artifacts.
This group expects to publish Specifications.
In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account. Please note, however, that W3C Membership is not required to join a Community Group.
This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2026-05-29 by Eric Jahn. The following people supported its creation: David Booth, Brian Handspicker, Eric Jahn, Natacha Fernandez and Nilesh Prajapati. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.
The group must now choose a chair. Read more about how to get started in a new group and good practice for running a group.
We invite you to share news of this new group on social media and other channels.
If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please email us at site-comments@w3.org
Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team
