Some effort here to define ontologies vs data structures.
"Ontologies are our conceptualization (understanding) of the world while information models (of data structures) describe and constrain how the data is stored and transmitted in messages."
He presents a strong argument on why ontologies - a semantic frame of reference - is so direly needed in healthcare.
"For obvious reasons, healthcare applications require a high degree of model quality and consistency. This is not always possible or easy to do with traditional approaches such as object-oriented design (the HL7 RIM is based on the UML) and data structures such as XML and relational database schemas.
A clear and clean separation of concerns is needed between the semantic model (the ontology) and the information model (the model of how the data is structured in an XML message or the health application's data store). The ontology can be used to verify that the content of a message is accurate in regard to our conceptualization of the world, while the information model is used to validate the data structure in the data stores and XML messages exchanged with other applications. "
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