Linked Open Drug Data from the Health Insurance Fund of Macedonia

Abstract

Information dissemination has always been in the focus of the computer science research community. New ways of information and data representation, storage, querying and visualization are being constantly developed and upgraded. Linked Open Data represents a concept which offers a comprehensive solution for information and data dissemination. It accomplishes this by aiming towards two things: to represent data in an open, machine-readable format, and to interlink data from heterogeneous repositories in a way which allows a large variety of usage scenarios for both humans and machines. On the other hand, health also represents a domain of high interest in our research community. In order to provide use-case scenarios for publishing and using healthcare data in Macedonia, we generated a dataset of five-star Linked Open Data, based on the data provided and published by the Health Insurance Fund (HIF) of the Republic of Macedonia. In this paper, we describe the process of transforming the data available at the HIF website, into data published in an open format, and interlinked with data from the DrugBank domain.