An Analysis of Demographic Data in Irish Healthcare Domain to Support Semantic Uplift

Healthcare data in Ireland is often fragmented and siloed making it difficult to access and use, and of the data that is digitized, it is rarely standardised from the perspective of data interoperability. The Web of Data (WoD) is an initiative to make data open and interconnected, stored and shared across the World Wide Web. Once a data schema is described using an ontology and published, it resides on the web, and any data described using Linked Data can be associated with this ontology so that the semantics of the data are open and freely available to a global audience. In this article we explore the semantic uplift of demographic data in the Irish context through an analysis of Irish data catalogues, and explore how demographic data is represented in health standards internationally. Through this analysis we identify the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) ontology as a basis for managing demographic health care data in Ireland.