Patient-centred healthcare subscribes to the belief that the patient has strengths, values and experiences that are important in the healthcare experience and relationship between those providing care and the patient. It requires patients to have the ability to obtain and understand health information, and make appropriate health decisions. The main problem here is that though the e-health applications provide patients and consumer with access to health information, each application is still individually used and the used and produced information remains within each system. In this paper, we present our work on developing a Personal Health Server, which allows the interoperation of e-health tools through the shared ontology. The ontology is developed by integrating the ontologies of the e-health tools, which support personal health records, e-health oriented blogs and information therapy. Technically the Personal Health Server is based on knowledge management technologies, and it is easily extensible to capture additional e-health tools.

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The technology developed for interoperable autonomous systems has significantly changed during the past few years. In particular, XML is rapidly becoming the key standard for data representation and transportation. However, the introduction of XML is not enough but many other XML-based technologies have to be deployed in order to achieve a seamless interoperability between the organisations of the healthcare sector. In this article we have restricted ourselves on electronic prescription systems and on the chances that Semantic Web technologies can provide. In particular, we report our work on medicinal ontologies and how they can be exploited (i) in providing querying facilities on electronic prescriptions and (ii) in achieving semantic interoperability between medicinal information systems. Especially, we introduced our adopted RDF-based messaging and show its gains over XML-based messaging.

Pharmaceutical community has members of various organizations such as from pharmacies, medicines agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and pharmacy oriented educational institutions. All these organizations publish medicinal information in their Web pages. These pages have different kinds of relationships but these relationships are not explicitly presented and therefore searching related pages is frustrating and time consuming. To alleviate this problem we have designed a specific data infrastructure and a vocabulary (OWL-ontology) for linking related pages. Further within each community member these web pages are annotated by linking them into domain specific ontologies. Thus, a community wide integrated ontology is weaved, which can be queried by SPARQL. In this paper, we illustrate how we have exploited the ideas of Linked Data in integrating the domain ontologies of the members of the pharmaceutical community, and how single SPARQL queries can be used in querying the data located in various data sources. In addition the architecture of the developed data infrastructure is presented.

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