Re: An argument for bridging information models and ontologies at the syntactic level

On 02/04/2008, Samson Tu <swt@stanford.edu> wrote:
> On Mar 27, 2008, at 3:58 AM, Kashyap, Vipul wrote:
>
> If your Acute MI is a subclass of Observation/Problem, then instances of
> "Acute MI" class are observations of Acute MI, not instances of the disease
> MI. An "observation" does not have severity, location, and so on. You lose
> the ability to talk about properties of the things in the world.  An
> information model refers to codes not because of implementation concern, but
> because component parts of informational entity are also informational
> entities, IMHO.

If they are not instances of the disease MI, through the class
hierarchy at least, then you have departed from common usage of the
term with respect to real world phenomena. Acute MI would hopefully be
subclassed from MI to provide that link even when a patient has a case
of Acute MI they are also implied to have a case of the disease MI.

Peter