Step 6: Collaborative Standards Convergence
Step #6 in the Yosemite Project roadmap is about semantic convergence of standards, toward a common set of concepts that are shared across healthcare domains. A shared RDF-backed standards repository can help facilitate that convergence.
Right now healthcare standards are developed without a common machine-processable semantic foundation. Step #5 of the Yosemite Project roadmap is about expressing healthcare standards (and proprietary pseudo-standards) in RDF and OWL as ontologies, to give them a common semantic foundation and enable them to be semantically linked. For example, a bridge ontology is an ontology that is used to semantically connect two or more other ontologies by asserting relationships between concepts in different ontologies. In step #6 the process of linking ontologies is facilitated by use of a shared RDF-backed standards repository, because it exposes the concepts defined in all of those ontologies in a single hub. The repository could also use heuristics to suggest potential linkages and check for logical consistency both within and between ontologies. Eventually this will encourage standards committees to converge on common -- though continually evolving -- set of concepts that are shared across the various subdomains within healthcare.
Related efforts: