Metamodelling of domain-specific standards for semantic interoperability

The IEEE defines interoperability as the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged. Semantic interoperability problems arise in various business domains [1]. Exemplary, we take a look at the healthcare domain. Connecting heterogeneous information sources in healthcare usually implies problems of semantic interoperability. A typical problem of semantic interoperability in this domain is that the same terms are often used for different concepts (homonyms) and that the same concepts are denoted by different terms (synonyms). Many standardization efforts aim at solving these problems [2]. Standards play an important role for ensuring a common understanding of transferred data among heterogeneous application systems [3]. To achieve effective communication, not only technical interfaces are required, but also common semantics for exchanged data. This paper focuses on problems of interoperability on the level of the application architecture, viz. Enterprise Application Integration [4]. Various health care standards were analyzed, uniformly structured and put into the context of a metamodel that enables interoperability based on domain-specific standards.