Simplified Upper Level Ontology (SULO) Co-creation Workshop

Overview

The SULO Co-creation Workshop was held in Ghent, Belgium, bringing together ontologists, data engineers, and clinical informaticians to collaboratively develop and evaluate the Simplified Upper Level Ontology (SULO) as a semantic hub for health data interoperability.

I participated as collaborator to explore the use of SULO as the upper ontology for clinical concepts from SPHN.

Workshop

The workshop was structured around four key themes:

• Explore SULO as a semantic framework: We walked through how SULO works, how its classes and predicates are organized, and what makes it flexible enough to handle different standards and use cases.
• Understand SULO's practical value: We discussed how SULO could help teams map concepts more consistently and reduces the friction of working across multiple standards.
• Learn from real-world experiences: AIDAVA and Res-Q+, projects for which SULO was originally designed for, shared their stories of mapping data across standards and the messy semantic inconsistencies they ran into along the way.

I presented our work applying SULO to clinical concepts in the SPHN RDF Schema, building on earlier exploration we did at the SWAT4HCLS 2025 Biohackathon.

We found three interesting patterns where some SPHN concepts:

• fit naturally into SULO's categories
• needed a bit of creative interpretation to align
• revealed blind spots which are either gaps in SULO's coverage or places where the SPHN RDF Schema itself could be more consistent