A Health Information Privacy Ontology: Toward Decision Support for Compliance Assessment

This paper describes the need for a formal ontology of health information privacy (HIP) and discusses a formal approach that promises to result in an ontology that is re-useable and extensible. Background: An ontology is a highly structured classification of facts, rules and relationships between things that are relevant in a particular knowledge domain. It is a way of capturing and representing knowledge so that it is useful. Ontology work related to privacy appears mainly to be directed toward web services and intelligent agents rather than toward providing support for human users. It does not appear at this stage that anyone has attempted to use a formal ontological approach in any privacy related domain nor to develop a HIP ontology. Although laws and standards are available to the public it is not always easy to find ones' way through the labyrinth of documents that form the corpora of privacy policy. An ontology for health information privacy is one way of making this knowledge more readily accessible to anyone who needs it especially those who make policy decisions. Discussion and Conclusion: An ontology of health information privacy is a first step toward providing decision support for those who need to assess the compliance of their health information systems policies against intra- and inter-jurisdictional requirements. A health information privacy ontology must necessarily be a representation of normative privacy protection policy. It must also provide a level of semantic consistency such that it is re-useable and extensible. A formal ontological approach using a basic formal ontology, an iterative knowledge acquisition process and practical design guidelines provides a development framework focused on achieving semantic consistency. Furthermore, semantic interoperability is more likely to be achieved if the ontology is coded using an ontology language standard such as OWL, the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) web ontology language standard, and widely used ontology editor, such as Protege. A HIP ontology designed and coded using a formal ontological approach and tools as described here will comply with and contribute to the harmonization efforts of both health informatics and W3C.