Enabling the European Patient Summary through triplespaces

One of the main items on the eHealth agenda of the European Community is the design and promotion of electronic patient summaries as an instrument to guarantee the continuity of healthcare across national boundaries and to facilitate the pervasive delivery of healthcare, thus ensuring the right to patient mobility and increasing the productivity and quality of health service delivery. From a technical point of view, this objective requires middleware technology which is able to cope with the stringent interoperability, multi-lingualism, distribution, and privacy requirements arising in eHealth settings. This paper presents triplespace computing, a coordination middleware for the Semantic Web,and demonstrates its relevance to the realization of the European Patient Summary, an infrastructure for sharing and coordinating access to patient summaries at the European level.