Building a semantic RESTFul API for achieving interoperability between a pharmacist and a doctor using JENA and FUSEKI

Abstract

Interoperability within different healthcare systems (clinics/hospitals/pharmacies) remains an issue of further research due to a barrier in sharing of the patient’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) information. To solve this problem, cross healthcare system collaboration is required. This paper proposes an interoperability framework that enables a pharmacist to access an electronic version of the patient’s prescription from the doctor using a RESTFul API with ease. Semantic technology standards like Web Ontology Language (OWL), RDF (Resource Description Framework) and SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) were used to implement the framework using JENA semantic framework tool to demonstrate how interoperability is achieved between a pharmacy and a clinic JENA was used to generate the ontology models for the pharmacy called pharmacy.rdf and clinic called clinic.rdf. The two models contain all the information from the two isolated systems. The JENA reasoner was used to merge the two ontology models into a single model.rdf file for easy querying with SPARQL. The model.rdf file was uploaded into a triple store database created using FUSEKI server. SPARQL Endpoint generated from FUSEKI was used to query the triple store database using a RESTFul API. The system was able to query the triple store database and output the results containing the prescription name and its details in JSON and XML formats which can be read by both machines and humans.