AIDAVA organises the upcoming SULO Co-Creation Workshop in Ghent
The AIDAVA project is organising a co-creation workshop on the Simplified Upper-Level Ontology (SULO), on 2 December 2025 in Ghent, Belgium. The workshop is a satellite event of the annual IHD conference and brings together leading experts in ontology, health data standards and semantic interoperability.
Semantic interoperability has been and remain a costly problem in health care (as in many other domains). The aim of the workshop is to build a shared understanding of how upper-level ontologies can improve semantic alignment across standards such as HL7 FHIR, openEHR, OMOP, SNOMED and SPHN, and therefore facilitate consistent mapping, supported with AI, facilitating health Ai powered data curation. Throughout the day, participants will work collectively to explore where SULO can bring value and how it can reduce the complexity and variability that often appear when harmonising heterogeneous clinical data.
The workshop will be opened by Professor Michel Dumontier from University of Maastricht and Professor Stefan Schulz from Medical University Graz, both world-wide expert in the field of ontology (and partners in the AIDAVA project). They will explain why SULO is important and how it could help. Afterwards members from the AIDAVA and Res-Q+ teams will contribute practical insights from their work; they will present lessons learned from real-world use cases. This will be followed by a series of technical sessions featuring data standards and semantic interoperability experts across Europe, each describing the interoperability challenges and opportunities within their respective standards.
In the afternoon, participants will engage in a hands-on hackathon. Each group will work with concepts such as Condition, Procedure and Measurement and evaluate how well these can be represented through SULO patterns. The session will examine where alignment works smoothly and where further development of SULO may be needed. The workshop will close with a consolidated set of observations and recommendations, including ideas for a second hackathon focusing on (automated) mapping, the need for wider community engagement and potential directions for continued development and governance of the SULO ontology.
AIDAVA is committed to supporting advances in semantic interoperability, at the core of the project’s goal: enabling high-quality, AI-supported curation of health data for citizens, clinicians and researchers. The Ghent workshop represents an important step toward that objective and provides a valuable platform for collaboration across the European health data ecosystem.
