SPHN publishes paper on a key tool for semantic health data modeling

We’re excited to share our latest publication in the Journal of Biomedical Semantics:

“The SPHN Schema Forge – Transforming Healthcare Semantics from Human-Readable to Machine-Readable Using Semantic Web Technologies”

The SPHN Schema Forge is a web service that addresses a key challenge in health data management: how to automatically convert data definitions defined in spreadsheets into formats that computers can understand and work with, known as Semantic Web technologies.

Developed by the Swiss Personalized Health Network Data Coordination Center (SPHN DCC), this web-based tool is used by numerous research projects, such as the SPHN-funded National Data Stream and Demonstrator projects. They use it to create and manage their own FAIR-compliant health data descriptions.

The recently published paper explains how the SPHN Schema Forge works behind the scenes to make a complicated process easier by automatically turning data definitions into semantically valid and meaningful components. The SPHN Schema Forge generates some of the core components of the SPHN Semantic Interoperability Framework, including the data schema (in the RDF data format), validation rules (in SHACL, a standard language for validating RDF graphs), queries (in SPARQL, a data query language), and a human-readable documentation (in HTML).

This publication represents a major milestone in building a Swiss interoperable health data ecosystem, and supports SPHN’s mission to enable data-driven, personalized healthcare research.

Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13326-025-00330-9

Learn more here:

• SPHN Schema Forge web service
• Documentation
• User guide