Semantic service-oriented integration of healthcare IT systems

E-health systems´ interoperability constitutes one of the main challenges of the IT society. Although current integration technologies are up to now quite mature, if we try to increase the level of automation in e-health integration scenarios, we confront several problems and challenges regarding the documentation of the semantics related to the interfaces and the data structures of the deployed e-health systems´ services. In this paper, we propose an approach, an architecture and a semantic model for the semantic service-oriented integration of healthcare legacy systems, combining the two fundamental computing paradigms, namely Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and lightweight semantics, for achieving semantic interoperability among heterogeneous e-health systems.