A semantic approach for digital long-term preservation of electronic health documents

Long-term preservation of electronic patient health information is a key issue for life-long electronic health records, however, it is poorly implemented in healthcare institutions and little attention is given to problems like obsolescence of formats and EHR applications or changing regulations, which jeopardize reusability of information after decades of preservation. We present in this paper an ontology driven approach to digital preservation and related metadata management which seems to be superior to conventional concepts of the digital library world.