Building Standardized Semantic Web RESTful Services to Support ICD-11 Revision

For the beta phase of the 11th revision of International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), the World Health Organization (WHO) intends to accept public input through a distributed model of authoring. To enable social computation and collaboration among broader communities, it is imperative but remains challenging to have an open-data access solution for ICD-11 contents. The objective of the present study is to describe our experiences and challenges on building the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) compliant Semantic Web RESTful services that aim to support the authoring application development of ICD-11. We propose a framework of building such services, which is composed of four layers: a semantic normalization layer, a semantic repository layer, a semantic services layer and an application layer. For the prototype implementation, we first generated the normalized ICD-11 linked RDF data through utilizing WHO ICD URI scheme and SKOS RDF data model. We used the Linked Data API and developed simple RESTful services for the standardized ICD-11 contents. We performed a preliminary evaluation on the usefulness of the system in terms of the feasibility of the services and its potential in support of building the Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) compliant services. In conclusion, we developed an effective framework of building standardized Semantic Web RESTful services on ICD-11 linked data, which would be useful to support ICD-11 revision.