When building a new application we are increasingly confronted with the need of reusing and integrating pre-existing knowledge. Nevertheless, it is a fact that this prior knowledge is virtually impossible to reuse as-is. This is true also in domains, e.g., eHealth, where a lot of effort has been put into developing high-quality standards and reference ontologies, e.g. FHIR1. In this paper, we propose an integrated methodology, called iTelos, which enables data and knowledge reuse towards the construction of Interoperable Electronic Health Records (iEHR). The key intuition is that the data level and the schema level of an application should be developed independently, thus allowing for maximum flexibility in the reuse of the prior knowledge, but under the overall guidance of the needs to be satisfied, formalized as competence queries. This intuition is implemented by codifying all the requirements, including those concerning reuse, as part of a purpose defined a priori, which is then used to drive a middle-out development process where the application schema and data are continuously aligned. The proposed methodology is validated through its application to a large-scale case study.

翻译：在构建新应用时，我们日益面临复用和集成已有知识的必要性。然而，现实情况是这些先前知识几乎无法原样复用。这一现状同样存在于诸如电子健康（eHealth）等领域，尽管这些领域已投入大量精力开发高质量标准与参考本体（例如FHIR架构）。本文提出一种名为iTelos的集成方法论，支持通过数据与知识复用来构建可互操作的电子健康记录（iEHR）。其核心思想在于：应用程序的数据层与模式层应独立开发，从而在遵循由能力查询形式化的需求导引下，最大限度地灵活复用先前知识。该思想通过将包括复用要求在内的所有需求编码为先验定义的目标（即"目的"）加以实现，进而驱动一个中间向外（middle-out）的开发流程，使应用模式与数据持续对齐。我们通过大规模案例研究验证了所提方法的有效性。