Re: Extension of the schema.org medical vocabulary

> At our work group we actively use the schema.org medical vocabulary for
> modeling a health information system. However, we find that there are
some entities that seem to be described very rudimentary. E.g. the drug
class models the 'activeIngredient', 'administrationRoute' or 'dosageForm'
simply as text, which doesn't provide much "semantic information".

I assume you are referring to http://schema.org/Drug .

* Are you suggesting that the range should be Text OR URL for these
properties?

* Or, are you suggesting that there should be additional, ontology-specific
attributes for linking into more comprehensive pharmacodynamic ontologies?

There are many shared ontologies indexed at
http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies . Specifically, RxNorm may
cover your use case:

* http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/1423
*
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/rxnorm/docs/2013/rxnorm_doco_full_2013-2.html

It appears that the latest version of RxNorm is not yet uploaded to
BioPortal.

> We also would like to propose a tighter coupling of Services/Business and
Medical Entities. Currently we implement these things in our own ontologies
which you will find here [1] bit by bit.
>
> My first question is now: Is there a broader interest/demand in
> improving this part of the vocabulary or are we the only ones with this
opinion?

>From http://schema.org/docs/meddocs.html :

>  Our approach is intended to be a framework for tagging known or novel
medical concepts/entities, and optionally their relationships, as they
appear in freeform text on the web. To manage scope, we have focused on
markup that will help in use cases such as patients, physicians, and
generally health-interested consumers searching for relevant health
information. It is explicitly not our goal to replace existing ontology
systems or to enumerate instances of medical entities, though our schema
can link to and take advantage of existing ontologies and enumerations. It
is also explicitly not a goal to support automated reasoning, medical
records coding, or genomic tagging, all of which would require
substantially more detailed (and hence high barrier-to-entry) modeling and
markup.

> And second: Is there any ongoing collaboration at the moment towards
> improving the medical vocabulary or should we just start a new proposal
> at the wiki?

>From http://schema.org/docs/meddocs.html :

> This initiative grew from a collaborative project that drew upon search
expertise from the schema.org partners but also gained immeasurably through
feedback from expert reviewers including the US NCBI; physicians at
Harvard, Duke, and other institutions, as well as from several health Web
sites. Contributions from the W3C Healthcare and Lifesciences group and Web
Schemas community also helped bridge the complex worlds of Web standards,
search and medicine/healthcare.