Proposed discussion topics for the March 2, 2022, meeting.

 

@David Booth, Since this topic overlaps with the RDF subgroup focus, we would welcome participation from your group.

 

Thanks,

 

Brian Pech

 

ITS Co-chair

 

 

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Hi guys,

 

I have been contacted by Jason Teeple and Jonathan Magen who are architects at Cigna/Evernorth (yes, that is my previous company) and they would like to have some time on our next ITS call to discuss a couple of topics that our workgroup would be responsible for:

1. Custom Binary Protocol
2. Semantic Web

 

Here is what Jonathan included as an introduction for us:

 

“I have two main points about FHIR and its development as a standard. One is related to the development of a custom binary format and the other centers around FHIR's positioning relative to the Web Standards ecosystem.

·        On the topic of a custom binary protocol, this seems ill-advised even given the uniqueness of FHIR's Resource structure. I believe that an existing family of standards such as CBOR would be better suited as it already exists and maps cleanly to JSON. Another, less comprehensive option would be MessagePack. They both have a wide variety of existing implementations for almost any language you can think of. In the event that a custom format is the way forward, I would like to discuss steps to make sure that it's easy enough for smaller players to develop compatible readers. Also there should be a reference implementation made available as FOSS.

·        On the topic of FHIR and existing web standards, my view is that FHIR is made up of web standards but doesn't take advantage of the larger ecosystem as much as I'd like to see. In particular, I wonder about combining FHIR's JSON, XML, and RDF (Turtle) formats with existing standards. By way of examples, JSON would pair nicely with ActivityPub, built on top of ActivityStreams, which is in turn built upon JSON-LD. Also I don't know if I see good usage of the RDF capabilities for automated reasoning or semantic inference/querying. I haven't even running assertions on FHIR documents using tools like SHACL.”

 

@Brian Pech Can you please add this to our agenda for the 3/2/2022 ITS call?  I will let them know we are accommodating.

 

Thanks,

 

Jeff

 

Jeff Brown

Health Standards and Interoperability Lead - FHIR Subject Matter Expert

MITRE Corporation – Health Innovation Center

HL7 certified for  FHIR®, CDA®, and V3 RIM® standards Co-chair HL7 Financial Management Workgroup
Co-chair HL7 Implementable Technology Specifications Workgroup
	8 jeffbrown@mitre.org   Å 781-528-3236