Analysis of ISO/TS 21526 towards the extension of a standardized query API

Metadata is often used for different tasks in the field of medical informatics: semantic description of data, quality validation, data integration, or information retrieval. Metadata definitions are captured and curated in time-consuming tasks and stored in metadata repositories that manage and preserve the metadata. Due to technical and legal restrictions, metadata is rarely as easily accessible and interoperable as it is necessary for modern information systems. In a previous study, a uniform interface based on the widely used ISO/IEC 11179 and the Facebook data retrieval language GraphQL was introduced as a solution to these technical obstacles. In the meantime, the ISO standard 21526 has been published, a recent version designed with a strong focus on health informatics. While it is conceptually oriented on the metamodel in ISO 11179, a number of extensions but also restructurings have been introduced. In this study, the authors investigated the difference between ISO 11179 and ISO 21526 and extended the unified metadata query interface to be future-proof and in particular, to support the semantic extensions of ISO 21526.