Semantic Web Technologies for Sharing Clinical Information in Health Care Systems

INTRODUCTION: Semantic Web (SW) technologies is capable of facilitating the management and sharing of knowledge and promote semantic interoperability among healthcare information systems. AIM: This article is designed to provide an overview of the SW technologies. METHODS: This article was performed based on a literature review and Internet search through scientific databases such as PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar. RESULT: The literature on SW addresses the technical and content aspects of SW technologies including description of ontology, interoperability standards in SW, creating ontology, types of ontologies, ontology editors, ontologies in healthcare. DISCUSSION: The discussion on this forum aims to help understand the benefits of SW technologies in healthcare. CONCLUSION: SW promotes a shift from the “syntactic” level to the “semantic” level of services, applications, and people and finally to pragmatic level by sharing knowledge among clinicians, researchers and healthcare providers.