Re: A question on the vocabulary for 'persons'

Hi Helen, Vipul, et al.,

I think we are at a significant point of discussion here. That is, we're 
talking about how to possibly bridge life science and health care 
through semantic web (not just applying semantic web technologies to 
health care and life sciences independently/separately). The person 
entity can serve as a bridge or linkage (at least at a high level). At a 
deeper level of connection, we might want to use the 
person/patient/subject's samples to integrate different types of 
experimental data associated with the samples. Different types of 
samples (blood, urine, tissue, etc) may becollected from the same 
person/paitent/subject over time for different types of studies/lab 
tests. In other words, how can we make sure all these samples collected 
at different time points orginate from the same person who might have 
participated in different studies. Vipul also touches upon the important 
issue of privacy and confidentiality in the clinical world. In this 
regard, I wonder how semantic web relates to the work on data encryption 
and security. For example, certain properties or property values of a 
person (or its class) may need to be encripted or made visible to 
certain authorized groups only.

Helen, when you say adding a triple for each role to handle role 
multiplicity, do you mean this is a meta triple? In RDF, for example, 
can we use reification or named graph to implement this?

Cheers,

-Kei

Kashyap, Vipul wrote:

> An important issue that is likely to come up soon in healthcare is the 
> integration of a person’s genetic information in the electronic 
> medical record.
>
> So, would it make sense to extend the person class to hold a person’s 
> genomic information?
>
> Another big issue is one of privacy. How does one specify ACLs related 
> to what fields of the person class be visible to which classes of users?
>
> Maybe we need another ontology there?
>
> ---Vipul
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *From:* public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org] *On Behalf Of 
> *helen.chen@agfa.com
> *Sent:* Thursday, September 14, 2006 8:08 AM
> *To:* kei.cheung@yale.edu
> *Cc:* Marco Brandizi; public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org; 
> public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org
> *Subject:* 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.
>>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 14 September 2006 14:13:01 UTC