RDB2RDF for Health Data: Advancing Semantic Interoperability
Jane-Ly Buhvestova, Gunnar Piho, Peeter Ross · Studies in health technology and informatics · 2025
This paper addresses challenges in healthcare data interoperability by exploring Resource Description Framework (RDF) formats and proposing a C#-based algorithm for converting relational databases (RDB) to RDF. The study identifies the limitations of existing RDB2RDF tools and develops a solution tailored for Visual Studio, with an emphasis on extensibility, foreign key mappings, and complex relationships such as composite keys. While the implementation provides a foundational approach, future work will focus on enhancing flexibility and scalability and implementing reverse RDF-to-database conversion. This paper is a preliminary part of an ongoing research project. This work has been partially conducted in the project "ICT programme", which was supported by the European Union through the European Social Fund.