Exploitation of ontologies for the management of clinical archetypes in ArchMS

An archetype is a formal model of a domain concept, expressed as a set of constraints based on a reference model and used in a particular domain. In clinical domains, an archetype is defined as a formal model of a clinical concept. Archetypes are considered by many researchers a fundamental tool for the achievement of semantic interoperability of electronic healthcare records. To date, different libraries of archetypes and a series of tools have been developed for archetype-based standards like ISO 13606 and openEHR. However, despite the importance of the semantics of the clinical content and the demonstrated usefulness of ontologies and semantic web technologies, the available platforms for managing archetypes do not exploit them. In this paper we present our archetype management system, which enables the semantic management of archetypes, performing a series of activities based on their OWL representation. The activities include the transformation of archetypes between standards, their validation or the recommendation of appropriate