Identification and Composition of Metadata for Cooperative Information Systems Illustration on the health information systems

Networked health organizations require cooperative Information Systems (IS) to provide different information services. These services contribute to improving the quality of care and to reducing costs. Furthermore, they improve processes for both care delivery and public health. These services require the merging of knowledge from multiple health sub-domains (pathologies and drugs, for instance) or various other domains. Correlating health with geography, enables analyses in interaction with many other dimensions (social, economical, environmental ...). Information and communication chains are particularly complex for these IS, regardless of their geographical scope (local, regional, national or international). We will adopt an IS perspective to focus on some problems where geographical aspects are essential. We then bring several elements to build an interoperability approach based on advanced methodologies and technologies. We begin by recalling some dimensions of the heterogeneity problems and interoperability issues for complex systems (§1). Then, we analyze some examples of IS for health networked organizations, where the geographical dimension is structuring for different purposes (§2). Our approach to interoperability between heterogeneous IS is based on the identification and composition of appropriate content descriptive and domain dependent metadata, in accordance with the standardization frameworks on the involved domains (§3). It is supported by an interoperability infrastructure based on those technologies recommended by the W3C consortium (§4). In particular, Namespaces, Resource Description Framework (RDF), XML/RDF Schema and Web Ontology Language improve levels of knowledge representation and exchange across heterogeneous domains, and help generate information even if corresponding data are not explicitly stored.