Re: Minutes of last week's (Dec 2) HL7 ITS RDF Subgroup / W3C HCLS COI call -- Review of FHIR ontology approaches (cont.)

Hi Tony,

Well, from a publication perspective, the RDF and OWL/etc. representation
of FHIR will become a core part of the FHIR specification and will not
include any v2, v3 or other aspects.

I think v3 is mostly done.  V2 will be particularly challenging because
there's little consistency in how instances are actually populated, so any
reliable semantic web stuff is going to be tough.  In any case, I don't
think the requirements for linking to other ontologies can or will change
how we represent content in FHIR as RDF.


Lloyd

--------------------------------------
Lloyd McKenzie

+1-780-993-9501



Note: Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the opinions and positions
expressed in this e-mail do not necessarily reflect those of my clients nor
those of the organizations with whom I hold governance positions.

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Anthony Mallia <amallia@edmondsci.com>
wrote:

> Lloyd and David,
>
> We should formally collect the requirements for the effort.
>
> Rob and I have started thinking about the vision of where this might go.
> Making a transliteral or verbatim representation of FHIR is certainly a
> stepping point but I believe that there are other mappings which need to be
> considered such as HL7 v2 given the size of deployment. The charter is not
> restricted to FHIR
>
> The higher level of ontology "dream" might be something that is an alloy
> and shows the various representations of health information normalized to
> an RDF+ style not bound to any of the exchange mechanisms.
> How the transliteral version maps to the dream for each standard would be
> needed.
>
> Tony Mallia
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Booth [mailto:david@dbooth.org]
> Sent: Monday, December 08, 2014 2:05 PM
> To: Lloyd McKenzie
> Cc: w3c semweb HCLS; its@lists.hl7.org
> Subject: Re: Minutes of last week's (Dec 2) HL7 ITS RDF Subgroup / W3C
> HCLS COI call -- Review of FHIR ontology approaches (cont.)
>
> Hi Lloyd,
>
> On 12/08/2014 01:35 PM, Lloyd McKenzie wrote:
> > I think we need to define our objectives for the RDF representation.
> > Mine are as follows:
>
> Great list!  My comments . . .
>
> >
> > 1. It must be possible to round-trip from XML/JSON through RDF
> > representation
>
> +1
>
> > * This includes retaining information about order of repeating
> > elements
>
> Is the order of repeating elements semantically significant in FHIR?
> I.e., would it affect or use of the interpretation of the information?
>   If not, then why do you view this as important?  (Playing devil's
> advocate here, to elicit the rationale.)
>
> > * Needs to allow for extensions where-ever they can appear, including
> > simple types (date, boolean, etc.)
>
> +1
>
> > 2. We want to be able to represent instances as RDF
>
> +1
>
> and Profiles as OWL/RDFS
>
> +0.9.  I think the profiles MUST be represented in some form of RDF, but
> whether it is done using OWL, RDFS or some combination of OWL, RDFS and
> something else (SKOS?) I think should be a judgement call that is made as
> we go along.
>
> > 3. Syntax needs to be "safe" when dealing with modifier extensions 4.
> > Syntax should support vocabulary bindings to code, Coding and
> > CodeableConcept - including dealing with extensible value sets and
> > multi-code system value sets 5. Syntax should enforce constraints that
> > are representable in RDF (i.e.
> > schema constraints, regular expressions, etc.)
>
> Can you explain what you mean by syntax in the above?  For example, if
> Turtle is used to serialize the RDF, what would the above points mean?
>
> > 6. In the RDFS/OWL, should expose at least minimal annotation
> > information for display
>
> +1
>
> BTW, there's another distinction that Eric Prud'hommeaux used to
> distinguish between different ontology styles or goals.  I think he
> referred to one style as a "mechanical" ontology, which might be fairly
> directly derived from the FHIR spec and is oriented mainly toward ease of
> round tripping between RDF and XML or JSON.  The other style is a "dream"
> ontology, which is friendlier and more natural for humans to
> view and may take more work to converge upon.   The two are not mutually
> exclusive, of course, but in prioritizing our work effort I'm of the
> opinion that we should FIRST go for the mechanical ontology, and once we've
> got that sufficiently nailed down, we could try to figure out a dream
> ontology, with the ability to automatically translate instance data between
> the two.
>
> Thanks,
> David Booth
>
>