Driving Standardization and Semantic Interoperability: Insights from the Pistoia Alliance Conference in London

Our CEO Heiner Oberkampf and VP Sales & Marketing Manfred Voglmaier recently attended the Pistoia Alliance Annual Conference in London — a key event bringing together leaders from across the life sciences and pharmaceutical sectors to accelerate innovation through collaboration and data standardization.

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A major highlight of the discussions was the continued progress of the IDMP Ontology Project, which our organization is proud to lead within the Pistoia Alliance. The initiative aims to create a shared semantic framework for medicinal product data, enabling interoperable knowledge graphs and supporting initiatives such as EMA PMS Data Alignment. Learn more about the project here.

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Key takeaways from this year’s conference included:

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1. Optimize – Standardize – Automate
   As emphasized by Mathew Woodwark, “You cannot automate at scale what’s not standardized.” True scalability and efficiency in life science processes rely on strong foundations of standardization — particularly through the use of persistent identifiers for all data elements.
2. The need for shared data languages
   Achieving seamless data exchange across organizations requires top-down standardization mandates. Encouragingly, more large pharmaceutical companies are embracing these approaches to foster consistency and interoperability.

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Evolving the IDMP OntologyThe project is shifting from expanding ontologies endlessly to a focused, pragmatic approach — prioritizing a few core objects such as Medicinal Product (MP), Packaged Medicinal Product (PMP), Pharmaceutical Product (PhP), and Substance. This allows organizations to build scalable, actionable knowledge graphs without unnecessary complexity.

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The collaboration with Crown Point Technologies and MAIN5 is helping establish vital bridges to CMC and EMA PMS use cases, ensuring alignment between regulatory and operational data domains.

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The discussions in London reaffirmed a shared industry vision: that semantic standards and governance are key to unlocking automation, interoperability, and ultimately, more efficient global healthcare systems.

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