JSON-LD for emerging healthcare standard (FHIR)?

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is an emerging 
healthcare standard being developed at HL7 that is gaining lots of 
momentum, and currently has both XML and JSON representations.  A joint 
HL7-W3C work group[1] has been formed to promote the use of RDF for 
healthcare information interoperability, and we've been investigating 
the potential use of JSON-LD for FHIR instead of plain JSON, so that the 
same FHIR JSON-LD messages could be automatically interpretable both as 
plain JSON and as RDF (because JSON-LD is both JSON and an RDF 
serialization).

This is potentially a fantastic opportunity to get JSON-LD adopted in 
healthcare IT.  *However*, if the draft standards for FHIR JSON are to 
be changed to specify JSON-LD, the proposed changes need to be made ASAP 
-- in the next 2-3 weeks -- before the FHIR standardization effort gets 
too far along.

I have started investigating the technical impact of switching to 
JSON-LD -- see my interim report[2] -- but I'm running into some issues 
around scoping and identifiers that I'm not sure of the best way to 
solve.  I'm not a JSON-LD expert, so I'm concerned that in my ignorance 
I may miss an important potential solution.

Would anyone who is JSON-LD savvy be willing to help on this?  You do 
NOT need to know FHIR or anything about healthcare IT, but your JSON-LD 
insight would be very helpful.

Thanks!
David Booth

1. http://wiki.hl7.org/index.php?title=RDF_for_Semantic_Interoperability
2. http://dbooth.org/2015/fhir/json-ld/fhir-in-json-ld.pdf

Received on Tuesday, 24 February 2015 19:29:52 UTC