Ontology and data modeling for the Italian Arthroplasty Registry

Italian Arthroplasty Registry (Registro Italiano ArtroProtesi, RIAP) faces important data integration challenges in collecting a huge quantity of data from different sources. This paper discusses the introduction of both an ontology and a central relational database supporting the described process, focusing on the main advantages and benefits coming from this structured knowledge representation applied to the arthroplasty. In particular, the ontology has the main role of conceptualising the RIAP domain by introducing a proposal to standardise the semantics of the involved concepts, relationships and attributes in order to improve the registry data quality, while the central database has the target of speeding up the process of data collection and processing.