Clinical data interoperability requires shared specifications of meaning. This is the rationale for clinical data standards. Up until now, the adoption of such standards has been varied, although they are increasingly advocated in an area where proprietary specifications prevail, and semantic resources are geared to specific purposes and limited by boundaries of languages and jurisdictions. This chapter highlights the need of data standards in the context of the difficult and heterogeneous field of clinical data and the way how they are addressed by terminologies, ontologies and information models. It provides an overview of existing standards and discusses quality and implementation issues. Emphasis is also put on the eStandards methodology, which investigates needs for health data standards, supports the creation of standardised artefacts and defines actions for the implementation of standards.
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