possible usecase: tables for medical clinical trial data

In our research on interpreting tables and generating LOD from them,
we've been looking tables that represent medical clinical trials.  The
attached pdf document shows some in medical journal articles.  I've
not yet found a good source of CSV files for such tables, but I'm
confident that there we can find many examples.

These represent another class of examples where the table does not fit
well into the simple relational example where each row in the table
represents an entity and the columns map to entity properties.

Here's a sketch of the format, which is very common for clinical
trials. The table describes a clinical trial as a whole.  Each row is
one subset of the subjects which can overlap with other subsets. The
first column or two columns specify a property (e.g., sex, age, died)
and value or value range (e.g., male, <10) of the subsets.  The other
columns describe different treatments (e.g., drug a, drug b, placibo)
and their values are often the number of patients and/or their
percentage of overall population.

The tables can get more complex, but they seem to follow a few common
patterns which I assume you learn in your first year in medical
school.

Received on Wednesday, 26 February 2014 12:53:51 UTC