Re: A question on the vocabulary for 'persons'

Kei

You raised a good point here. 

Indeed, person can have multiple roles in a given organization or 
scenario. Capturing this multiplicity in the "person" ontology should not 
be a problem - you simply add a triple for each role the person assumes. 

These roles are likely to change over time, as you point out in your 
email.  Such changes should not be a problem, just as  one might change 
their home addresses.   As with your home address, you can add 
"effectiveUntil" and "effecitiveOn" to specify the valid period of this 
information.  In addition, a role is only meaningful within a scope.  In 
HL7, it uses "scopedRole" and "playedRole" to set this context.  This, 
too, can be modelled in ontology.

My problem is with the so-called "participation".  Participation is 
similar to "role" but might change in each episode.  For example, Dr. K is 
a chest specialist (Role) in hospital A.  He is sick today and is treated 
at hospital A.  So in such "patient-encounter" episode, he is a patient 
(Participation). 

I am not sure if the person ontology should concern such transitional 
concepts.

Helen




kc28 <kei.cheung@yale.edu> 
Sent by: public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org
09/13/2006 09:45 PM

To
Marco Brandizi <brandizi@ebi.ac.uk>
cc
public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
Subject
Re: A question on the vocabulary for 'persons'








Hi Marco et al.,

It is also possible that a person can have multiple roles (e.g., 
researcher and teacher). Are there standard vocabularies that we can use 
to describe roles, for example? There might be a temporal aspect as 
well. For example, a person at one point was a postdoc but later became 
a professor. If this is taken into account, we can ask questions like 
what is the most recent role(s) a person has. This may somewhat relates 
to how we should model a paitent/subject involved in a longitudinal 
studies. Besides relations (how persons relate to each other), we might 
also want to think about how persons are grouped for different 
basic/clinical research purposes. For examples, panels vs. cohorts, 
population samples vs. pedigrees, etc... This might have been 
thought/discussed about by other people. I may just reignite such 
thought and discussion.

Cheers,

-Kei

Marco Brandizi wrote:

>
> kei cheung wrote:
>
>> Based on my limited experience, a person in the life science and 
>> healthcare context can be considered as a subject or patient (which
>> can be a subclass of person). Of course, there are other roles a
>> person can play (e.g., doctors, researchers, and authors). For
>> genetic studies, a group of subjects/indviduals may be a
>> family/pedigree. In this case, relationships among these  family
>> members may include Father_of, Mother_of, Child_of, etc. Other types
>
>
> Hi Kei,
>
> In addition, I think there is another side as well: science community
> people, having a role (student, teacher, director of), relations with
> fields of study ( immunologist, studies TLR signalling), relations with
> events and scientific production ( has published, has organized
> conference ), relations with other people ( works with, supervisor of,
> ... ).
>
> I vaguely remember at least one similar case of ontology, does anyone
> have further details?
>
> Cheers.
>