A Transfusion Ontology for Remote Assistance in Emergency Health Care (Position Paper) Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani, and Cristiano Fugazza Universit`a degli studi di Milano, Dipartimento di Tecnologie dell’Informazione via Bramante, 65 26013 Crema (CR), Italy {ceravolo, damiani, fugazza}@dti.unimi.it http://ra.crema.unimi.it/kiwi Abstract. Transfusion Ontology is a simple task-based ontology de- veloped in the emergency health care domain. Taking the assumption that ontologies are instruments for supporting exchange of information among parties, the principles governing the design of this ontology was mainly based on the identification of the interactions of messages to be exchanged among parties. This paper shows how this simple design prin- ciple is able to guide a whole ontology construction. 1 Introduction Complex organizations are defined by the scope of their internal languages more than by any physical boundary. When two or more different organizations need to cooperate and exchange information, matching their internal vocabularies is nearly always one a main concern. Strategies to bridge inter-organizational lan- guage barriers when, say, exchanging business documents have historically been based on meeting and putting common terms and concepts in a standard for- mat. In web-based environments the more successful technologies are definitely XML vocabularies and protocols. In this case, the common vocabulary relies on a semi-structured data model, that is used for defining both the content of messages and the protocol for exchanging messages. Examples of such kind of vocabulary can be SOAP [10] or ebXML [7]. But usually XML vocabularies are used as protocols for enforcing messages according to a standard format. The vocabulary strongly bound the data format predefining a set of terms but also constraining the structural position of elements. This approach can be very ef- fective if parties completely agree on the data format to be exchanged. But a more abstract level of agreement among parties can be achieved by means of the adoption of an ontology. An ontology is an explicit specification of a con- ceptualization [3]. The specification of an ontology allows parties to achieve a common conceptual ground for enabling interoperability. But this specification is not tasked to describe data itself. The goal is to describe the semantics of data without involving the data format and this can be done adopting a meta- data layer. But the centrality of the notion of interaction used in web-based R. Meersman, Z. Tari, P. Herrero et al. (Eds.): OTM Workshops 2006, LNCS 4278, pp. 1044–1049, 2006. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006