Re: Wait a sec...What about the HL7 RIM An Universal Exchange Language

I like Eric Neumann's description of RDF as "recombinant data".

Agreed. Choosing something other than HL7 as the lingua franca for
assertions doesn't devalue HL7! We can be happy that we got the information
from one machine to another! It's a long haul from the days of big-endian,
little-endian. The value is not in the messages (or message syntax) but what
is in them (the cargo, the payload). But how will we interoperate between
HL7 and CDISC? I suppose that an ontology will help.. BRIDG anyone ;) Cecil?

The way that XML quietly infiltrated all our computer systems was by making
it easy to describe and parse data of all shapes and sizes. Will OWL/RDF do
the same by making it reasonably easy to describe the meaning of messages
and documents?

HL7 isn't going away. It is the standard. So, how can its users take
advantage of other (non-HL7) sources of information that are related to the
contents of its messages? And how can other systems, for example, clinical
research systems relate their information and constraints to HL7 data? See
http://hcls.deri.org/coi/demo/ (makes use of pseudo-CDISC and HL7, and Drug
Ontology), presented at AMIA. There should be machine-readable and
reason-able links from one set of assertions to the other, that can make use
of context (read: provenance). Could the HL7 provenance help us make use of
the 'cargo' in another context? i.e. assertion came from message issued
by..

-Scott

-- 
M. Scott Marshall, W3C HCLS IG co-chair, http://www.w3.org/blog/hcls
Leiden University Medical Center / University of Amsterdam
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marshall
<http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marshall>
On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 11:06 PM, conor dowling
<conor-dowling@caregraf.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Michael Miller <
> mmiller@systemsbiology.org> wrote:
>
>> hi all,
>>
>>
>>
>> "unambiguous identifier for "things""
>>
>>
>>
>> i agree, this has been a known issue for many years (as you well know,
>> tim) but its importance is just now growing as multi-omics studies and
>> sharing of EHR records is becoming more common.
>>
>>
>>
>> "It is HL7 V3"
>>
>>
>>
>> i also agree, in a sense, with this.  HL7 messages capture information as
>> a whole, as an entity, so in that representation it is also true that
>> semantic web technologies would have a hard time, as is, making sense of
>> them because semantic web technologies wants a fact by fact representation,
>> e.g. triple store.
>>
>
> But turn this on its head. HL7 messages come from "islands of data" which
> have undetermined linkage. Think of a lab result that has a local code,
> rather than LOINC. LOINC is equivalent to a link to the outside. Effectively
> the local code is meaningless outside.
>
> By its nature, linked data should resolve. If there is a url, you should be
> able to chase it down. The equivalent of a local code is a resolvable URL
> which presumably leads to some sort of description of what that local
> concept means, perhaps enough to translate it to a more commonly understood
> equivalent.
>
> You ask for any number of triples from a semantic endpoint, enough to
> capture what you need - all lab result assertions over a period for
> such-and-such a person. That's no different than a query in HL7 (or any
> other RPC like mechanism).
>
> The key difference with linked data (specifically) and "islands with
> protocol access" is linkage: the idea that links always resolve to something
> meaningful as opposed to identifiers that while unambiguous, may lead you no
> where. The problem with the old school which Parsa's "30 years of XML and
> HL7 experience" captures nicely is wrapped up in this.
>
> I've coded this stuff a good bit and everyone gets fixated on the syntax of
> messages/xml blocks. People are happy if a coded element is "correct", that
> it "conforms" as opposed to being useful or meaningful. And the problem lies
> not with them, but the mechanism. It's put the focus on "truck", not
> "cargo".
>
> Conor
>
>
>>
>>
>> cheers,
>>
>> michael
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org [mailto:
>> public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org] *On Behalf Of *Peter.Hendler@kp.org
>> *Sent:* Wednesday, December 15, 2010 8:18 AM
>> *To:* markw@illuminae.com
>> *Cc:* public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org; public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org;
>> twclark@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
>>
>> *Subject:* Wait a sec...What about the HL7 RIM An Universal Exchange
>> Language
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> The PCAST did not take into consideration (maybe they don't even know)
>> there is an universal exchange language for healthcare.  It is HL7 V3.  The
>> CDA is merely one of virtually infinite structures that can be constructed
>> from the RIM.  The meta information as well as the clinical data is
>> unambiguously represented by RIM.  There is no reason to ignore the
>> thousands of man years that went into designing the RIM.  The RIM Based
>> Application Architecture  (RIMBAA) work group at HL7 has had many
>> demonstrations of RIM based applications.  We don't need to re invent the
>> wheel.  CDA is only one particular RIM structure designed for one particular
>> use case.  Those of us who have been working at HL7 for years are blown away
>> by the suggestion that there needs to be a different wheel invented.
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>> *Mark <markw@illuminae.com>*
>> Sent by: public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org
>>
>> 12/14/2010 06:44 PM
>>
>> To
>>
>> "Tim Clark" <twclark@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu>
>>
>> cc
>>
>> public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
>>
>> Subject
>>
>> Re: An Universal Exchange Language
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> But seriously, Tim, if we were to pursue this problem, we would need some
>>
>> form of unambiguous identifier for "things"... and given the distributed
>> nature of the biomedical domain, we'd want to make sure that there was
>> some way of resolving that identifier to obtain metadata about it from a
>> variety of disparate sources who might have very different information -
>> clinical, molecular, demographic, etc...
>>
>> hmmmm....
>>
>>
>