Knowledge Management of Controlled Vocabularies for Semantic Interoperability of Healthcare Applications

Controlled vocabularies such as terminologies and ontologies are regarded as a solution to the achievement of semantic interoperability across healthcare applications. This is yet to be attained. The semantics of current healthcare applications are directly in the source code and database structure and therefore cannot be readily shared. The multilevel model-driven approach is a method to produce semantically interoperable healthcare applications by providing sharable concept models. At this point, the methodology is proven, but implementations are still required. This study presents the fundamentals of knowledge modeling of controlled vocabularies for a XML-based multilevel model specification. The term subset ´Tuberculosis´ of the 10th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) is modeled as constraints to the XML Schema that defines the Reference Model. The Brazilian Mortality and Hospital Information Systems provided sample data for demonstration. The demonstration of the semantic validation of the XML data instances that include the ICD-10 ´Tuberculosis´ term set, converted to the multilevel model generated, is presented.