One Health Unified Representation Standard
Information relevant to one health and ecohealth remains distributed across healthcare, research, environmental monitoring, public administration, education, community systems and other domain-specific infrastructures. Existing standards can represent specialised data effectively, but cross-domain relationships between observations, resources, conditions, interventions, technologies and outcomes are not consistently represented or interoperable. This limits the ability to connect evidence across systems, compare observations, preserve provenance, evaluate interventions and reuse information across institutional and geographic boundaries. The proposed One Health Operational Representation Standard (OHORS), addresses this specific interoperability gap as a common representation layer rather than as a replacement for existing domain standards.
The specification is being engineered around operationally relevant entities, identifiers, relationships and provenance. Observations are represented together with the devices, sensors, instruments, software, models, protocols, workflows, standards, organisations and actors involved in generating, processing and validating them, and can be linked to the resources, technologies, interventions and outcomes with which they are associated. The implementation prioritises simplicity, portability and scalability, using structured JSON for accessible interoperability and NDJSON for streaming, archival, distributed processing and large-scale exchange. The representation must remain usable under incomplete and unevenly distributed observations and across environments ranging from community initiatives and open hardware to institutional information systems and large datasets.
The intended output is a common machine-readable structure for information exchange, provenance, implementation, monitoring, evaluation, prioritisation and continuous improvement. It is designed to connect information generated in one health practice, monitoring programmes, scientific research and education without requiring participating systems to adopt a single database or replace their existing standards. Standard mappings and alignment rules will allow heterogeneous terminology, structures, identifiers and granularities to remain connected, while validation and provenance mechanisms support traceability, reproducibility, evidence quality and implementation science. OHORS remains under active development. The current work requires engineering and validation of the specification and governance model, interoperability mappings, schemas, transformation utilities, validation software, reference implementations, technical documentation, demonstration datasets and educational assets. Existing computational infrastructure is already available, allowing the requested development funding to be directed to implementation and dissemination rather than equipment or overhead. The objective is to establish a publicly governed, vendor-neutral and independently implementable open specification and supporting free open software ecosystem capable of being progressively validated and deployed across diverse one health eco-regions Worldwide.
