RE: [TMO] patient record normalization

* Michel_Dumontier <Michel_Dumontier@carleton.ca> [2010-09-10 16:30-0400]
> 
> > But then anyone merging two TMO documents with different units has the
> > normalization burden. If we pick a unit and annotate the predicates,
> > then the folks who would have to do the work of merging with non-TMO
> > documents (who would have to introduce some rules/canonicalization
> > pipeline anyways) have the OWL hooks to automate that merging.
> 
> Again, if we are considering TMO, then we can impose a restriction to specify the unit - we can also make this clear in documentation relating to the measurements with units.

My thesis is that including such apparent flexibility does a bit more
harm than good; that the potential good is almost exclusively in the
use of tools which can make generic use of standard value predicates
(rdf:value, muo:numericalValue) e.g. data browsers. The harm is that
you are advertising a flexibility that you don't intend to honor; the
freedom of units. If we impose the reasoning constraint not on the
authoring pipeline, but instead on those who would make use of the
generic predicates, we reduce the likelihood of non-normalized data.


> > > Also, having domain-independent predicates makes it easier to render
> > a view
> > > of the data (for human consumption) that includes visual cues
> > regarding the
> > > units of measures associated with values directly from the data since
> > such
> > > tools will always expect the same set of terms to capture a value and
> > its
> > > unit of measurement.
> > 
> > If you've bought the argument for early normalization, isn't it
> > needlessly dangerous to offer the freedom to express BP in mmHg in an
> > ontology that's required to have BP in MPa? It does put more burden on
> > the use of generic data browsers (they'd have to read the OWL in order
> > to present the user with units), but I think that use case is small
> > compared to the cost of data consumption.
> 
> I don't think we should tailor our data model to generic data browsers - they are far too simple for the complex knowledge that we have to represent. 
> 
> m.

-- 
-ericP

Received on Friday, 10 September 2010 22:41:14 UTC