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One model, one language for joined-up care
Explore the shared language of health and care: every concept, relationship, and diagram of a model conformant to ISO 13940:2026.
Alignment with the DOLCE upper ontology
Every upper-level concept in the model is aligned with DOLCE — the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering standardised in ISO/IEC 21838-3:2023 — giving the concept system a formally validated backbone.

One model, one language for joined-up care
Explore the shared language of health and care: every concept, relationship, and diagram of a model conformant to ISO 13940:2026.
- About ISO 13940:2026 (ContSys)
  ISO 13940:2026 is the second edition of the international standard defining the system of concepts needed to describe health and care businesses and to support continuity of care across clinical and social settings.
- The role of a conformant model
  A model conformant to ISO 13940 acts as the shared semantic foundation on which information systems, integration programmes, service specifications, and analyses are built — the fixed point that keeps them all saying the same thing.
- Illustrative use cases
  Three worked scenarios showing the conformant model doing its job: carrying meaning intact across a discharge, a referral, and the secondary use of care data.
- Continuity of care: the organising goal
  Continuity of care is what the concept system exists to protect: the ability of a subject of care to move between services, organisations, and sectors without losing the thread of their care.
- Social care as a first-class citizen
  The second edition of ISO 13940 is the product of extensive international work to bring social care fully inside the concept system, so that integrated care can be modelled — and delivered — without a semantic seam between sectors.
- Alignment with the DOLCE upper ontology
  Every upper-level concept in the model is aligned with DOLCE — the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering standardised in ISO/IEC 21838-3:2023 — giving the concept system a formally validated backbone.
- How the model fits the wider standards estate
  Conformance to ISO 13940 brings built-in coherence with the record, terminology, and architecture standards a modern care system already depends on.
- The master diagrams
  The full-size master diagrams behind ISO 13940:2026: the architecture of the concept areas, the activities of a continuity of care process, and the DOLCE alignment, drawn in UML notation following ISO 24156-1.
- General terms
  The foundational terms that recur throughout the model — care, health, party, role, resource, and the concepts of knowledge, information, and data.

Alignment with the DOLCE upper ontology

Every upper-level concept in the model is aligned with DOLCE — the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering standardised in ISO/IEC 21838-3:2023 — giving the concept system a formally validated backbone.

A domain concept system is only as sound as the categories beneath it. For the 2026 edition, the upper-level concepts and their definitions were aligned with the DOLCE top-level ontology as defined in ISO/IEC 21838-3:2023 — itself built on the requirements for top-level ontologies in ISO/IEC 21838-1:2021 — and DOLCE was used to structurally validate the continuity model. In other words, the distinctions the model draws between things like persons, organisations, activities, processes, states, plans, and information objects are not ad hoc: each is anchored to a rigorously defined top-level category.

Figure 1. Model concepts in relation to DOLCE

The standard's master drawing of this alignment appears full-size in The master diagrams.

Why an upper ontology matters

Structural validation. Anchoring every concept to a top-level category exposes category errors — an "activity" that is really a document, a "state" that is really an event — before they harden into interfaces and data.
Safe extension. When local concepts must be added, the DOLCE backbone dictates where they belong, so extensions stay consistent with the core rather than drifting away from it.
Reliable mapping. Terminologies, other standards, and other ontologies that share (or can be related to) a top-level ontology can be mapped to the model with far greater confidence, because alignment is checked at the category level, not just by name similarity.
Readiness for machine reasoning. A concept system with formal ontological commitments is a sound basis for knowledge graphs, inference, and the automated consistency checking that large-scale interoperability increasingly demands.

Some ontological elements needed to understand the structure sit above the care domain itself; they can appear in the model's diagrams even though they are not care concepts. That is a feature of the approach: the care concepts stay focused on care, while the upper ontology quietly guarantees their coherence.