Seamlessly and Securely sharing health care data with Triple Space Communication

The eHealth is an eBusiness scenario in which the integration problem is amplified by the intensive use of knowledge, by the need of accurately handling citizens’ privacy and by live or death implications. eHealth has been seeking for semantic interoperability for more then a decade, but securely sharing health data among healthcare organizations remains an open challenge. Many standardization activities (such as HL7 CDA, openEHR, CEN ENV 13606 / EHRcom, DICOM, IHE) are addressing this problem but none of them has achieve the desirable level of flexibility. In this paper we describe how sharing of health care data respecting parties’ autonomy and citizens’ privacy is addressed in TripCom, which is a EC funded project starting in April 2006) aiming at developing an highly scalable, semantically enhanced communication infrastructure. Such infrastructure is the result of the integration of Tuple Space, Semantic Web (triple), and Web Services technologies. Tuple Space and Web services and provides platform for application integration based on persistent publication. Semantic Web provide machine processable semantics in order to allow mechanized integration of services (data and processes). Decoupling communications TripCom will reduce (if not eliminate) the need for a priori knowledge of the partner and communication channel thus enabling multi-party interaction for free.