Integrating Product Information in the Pharmaceutical Sector

In recent years, increased attention has been paid to what is called semantic interoperability in eHealth, being the interoperable identification and description of drugs at its very core. In spite of the efforts toward having a common way to describe drugs, there is no universal nomenclature but several attempts like SNOMED CT (http://www.ihtsdo.org/snomed-ct/) or the biomedical ontologies in OBO Foundry (http://www.obofoundry.org/) and BioPortal (http://bioportal.bioontology.org/). This chapter describes an approach that applies NeOn technology to bridge the gap between different ontologies describing pharmaceutical products.