Because of the ever-increasing amount of information in patients' EHRs, healthcare professionals may face difficulties for making diagnoses and/or therapeutic decisions. Moreover, patients may misunderstand their health status. These medical practitioners need effective tools to locate in real time relevant elements within the patients' EHR and visualize them according to synthetic and intuitive presentation models. The RAVEL project aims at achieving this goal by performing a high profile industrial research and development program on the EHR considering the following areas:(i) semantic indexing,(ii) information retrieval, and (iii) data visualization. The RAVEL project is expected to implement a generic, loosely coupled to data sources prototype so that it can be transposed into different university hospitals information systems.