Re: GRDDL for clinical research data?

On Thu, 17 Aug 2006, Dan Connolly wrote:

>
> Chime,
>
> You mentioned clinical research data in our 1st meeting.
>
> I suspect that's an interesting XML Schema (or plain XML?) use case.
>
> Do you have any details you can share?

Yes, absolutely.  Actually this is the primary motivation for joining the 
GRDDL WG.  We have been developing a clinical research data management 
system which uses XML as the 'main' representation format (organized 
around a patient record), edits the XML remotely (on a variety of devices) 
via XForms, submits the XML document (via HTTP PUT to a unique URI for 
each such record) to a server which (as part of the content management 
services) transforms the XML to an RDF equivalent graph for persistence.

Ofcouse, the expense of dual representation is space, but the primary 
value is being able to query both as XML and as RDF (the latter being 
more amenable for investigative question that rely on alot more 
interpretation than a structured format such as XML will provide).

A GRDDL approach could eleviate this expense by allowing a patient record (or any XML-based 
collection of clinical research data) to be queried semantically (via 
SPARQL) 'on demand' by associating a GRDDL profile to the specific patient 
record XML vocabulary.

Imagine a fellow assigned to determine a search criteria to identify a 
patient population for a particular study.  He might have a set of 
classifications specific to the study he could express as logical rules 
(N3 rules).  Then, he could write a client (that understood 
GRDDL) that speculatively picked a few patient records at random from a 
remote server (as XML documents) each of which would be associated (by GRDDL 
profile) to a transform to extract the clinical data as RDF (expressed in 
a universally supported vocabulary for CPR - such as the HL7 OWL ontology 
that Helen Chen from Agfa has been working on) and ask his 
speculative questions of the resulting RDF graph.

Or (to take the scenario a step further), apply the study specific rules 
on the resulting RDF to classify the patient data according to his domain 
of interest (specific diagnoses, pathological observations, etc..)


Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
ogbujic@ccf.org

Received on Thursday, 17 August 2006 19:13:02 UTC