Combining OpenEHR archetype definitions with SWRL rules – a translation approach Leonardo Lezcano, Miguel-Angel Sicilia, Pablo Serrano Information Engineering Research Unit Computer Science Dept., University of Alcalá Ctra. Barcelona km. 33.6 – 28871 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain {leonardo.lezcano, msicilia}@uah.es Abstract. The interoperability of electronic healthcare information systems is critical for a more effective healthcare management. Several specifications and standards have been created for facilitating such interoperability at different le- vels. Among them, the OpenEHR initiative emphasizes the sharing of flexible specifications of healthcare information pieces in the form of archetypes. How- ever, the OpenEHR ADL language does not provide support for rules and infe- rence which are important pieces of clinical knowledge. This paper reports on an approach to convert ADL definitions to OWL and then attach rules to the semantic version of the archetypes. This allows for an automated means to reuse knowledge expressed in the form of rules which is also flexible and fol- lows the same philosophy of sharing archetypes. Keywords. Electronic healthcare records, clinical archetypes, ontologies, OWL, SWRL 1 Introduction Clinical practice can be represented as an iterative, care delivery process that starts with observations of the status of the patient. Such observations lead to informed opinions on the part of a health care professional, including assessment of the current situation, goals for a future situation and plans for achieving the goals. Then those plans become into detailed instructions for clinical practice that eventually trigger the appropriate actions. At this stage, we may need to repeat the whole iteration until the problem is solved (Elstein et al., 1987). These four kinds of information are the breakpoints where communication between independent systems is frequently lost because of data ambiguity and incompatibility. Several specifications and standards have been created for facilitating such interoperability at different levels. Among them, the OpenEHR 1 model proposes their modular definition in the form of arche- types that restrict their format and describe their possible values. Observation con- cepts like blood pressure, evaluations like pregnancy, and instructions like intraven- ous fluid administration are quite known clinical statements that have already been 1 http://www.openehr.org/