Building Interoperable Electronic Health Records as Purpose-Driven Knowledge Graphs

When building a new application we are increasingly confronted with the need of reusing and integrating pre-existing knowledge. Nevertheless, it is a fact that this prior knowledge is virtually impossible to reuse as-is. This is true also in domains, e.g., eHealth, where a lot of effort has been put into developing high-quality standards and reference ontologies, e.g. FHIR1. In this paper, we propose an integrated methodology, called iTelos, which enables data and knowledge reuse towards the construction of Interoperable Electronic Health Records (iEHR). The key intuition is that the data level and the schema level of an application should be developed independently, thus allowing for maximum flexibility in the reuse of the prior knowledge, but under the overall guidance of the needs to be satisfied, formalized as competence queries. This intuition is implemented by codifying all the requirements, including those concerning reuse, as part of a purpose defined a priori, which is then used to drive a middle-out development process where the application schema and data are continuously aligned. The proposed methodology is validated through its application to a large-scale case study.

Query Answering over Contextualized RDF/OWL Knowledge with Forall-Existential Bridge Rules: Decidable Finite Extension Classes (Post Print)

The proliferation of contextualized knowledge in the Semantic Web (SW) has led to the popularity of knowledge formats such as \emph{quads} in the SW community. A quad is an extension of an RDF triple with contextual information of the triple. In this paper, we study the problem of query answering over quads augmented with forall-existential bridge rules that enable interoperability of reasoning between triples in various contexts. We call a set of quads together with such expressive bridge rules, a quad-system. Query answering over quad-systems is undecidable, in general. We derive decidable classes of quad-systems, for which query answering can be done using forward chaining. Sound, complete and terminating procedures, which are adaptations of the well known chase algorithm, are provided for these classes for deciding query entailment. Safe, msafe, and csafe class of quad-systems restrict the structure of blank nodes generated during the chase computation process to be directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of bounded depth. RR and restricted RR classes do not allow the generation of blank nodes during the chase computation process. Both data and combined complexity of query entailment has been established for the classes derived. We further show that quad-systems are equivalent to forall-existential rules whose predicates are restricted to ternary arity, modulo polynomial time translations. We subsequently show that the technique of safety, strictly subsumes in expressivity, some of the well known and expressive techniques, such as joint acyclicity and model faithful acyclicity, used for decidability guarantees in the realm of forall-existential rules.

Query Answering over Contextualized RDF/OWL Knowledge with Forall-Existential Bridge Rules: Attaining Decidability using Acyclicity (full version)

The recent outburst of context-dependent knowledge on the Semantic Web (SW) has led to the realization of the importance of the quads in the SW community. Quads, which extend a standard RDF triple, by adding a new parameter of the `context' of an RDF triple, thus informs a reasoner to distinguish between the knowledge in various contexts. Although this distinction separates the triples in an RDF graph into various contexts, and allows the reasoning to be decoupled across various contexts, bridge rules need to be provided for inter-operating the knowledge across these contexts. We call a set of quads together with the bridge rules, a quad-system. In this paper, we discuss the problem of query answering over quad-systems with expressive forall-existential bridge rules. It turns out the query answering over quad-systems is undecidable, in general. We derive a decidable class of quad-systems, namely context-acyclic quad-systems, for which query answering can be done using forward chaining. Tight bounds for data and combined complexity of query entailment has been established for the derived class.