Based on conversations on this
topic, there appears to be consensus of the need for multi-layered
knowledge representation schemes for heatlhcare. Will be great if we
could brainstorm and come to some sort of consensus on these "layers".
Would like to propose a strawman as enumerated below.
Layer 0 = Entity - Attribute -
Value or RDF triple based rerpesentations.
Layer 1 = MetaClasses, e.g.,
Observation as in HL7/RIM
Layer 2 = Classes in a Patient
Model, Document Models, etc, e.g., the class of HbA1c results for a
class of Patients.
Layer 3 = Data that are
instances of Classes, e.g., a particular HbA1c result for a patient
John...
A term from upper ontology work that is handy for discussing
ontological layers is "discriminant". By this I intend to mean a
general predicate, able to usefully characterize something along one
particular semantic dimension. Examples of important discriminants
would include: