Re: GRDDL for clinical research data?

On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 15:12 -0400, Chimezie Ogbuji wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 17 Aug 2006, Dan Connolly wrote:
> 
> >
> > Chime,
> >
> > You mentioned clinical research data in our 1st meeting.
> >
> > I suspect that's an interesting XML Schema (or plain XML?) use case.
> >
> > Do you have any details you can share?
> 
> Yes, absolutely.  Actually this is the primary motivation for joining the 
> GRDDL WG.  We have been developing a clinical research data management 
> system which uses XML as the 'main' representation format (organized 
> around a patient record), edits the XML remotely (on a variety of devices) 
> via XForms, submits the XML document (via HTTP PUT to a unique URI for 
> each such record) to a server which (as part of the content management 
> services) transforms the XML to an RDF equivalent graph for persistence.
> 
> Ofcouse, the expense of dual representation is space, but the primary 
> value is being able to query both as XML and as RDF (the latter being 
> more amenable for investigative question that rely on alot more 
> interpretation than a structured format such as XML will provide).
> 
> A GRDDL approach could eleviate this expense by allowing a patient record (or any XML-based 
> collection of clinical research data) to be queried semantically (via 
> SPARQL) 'on demand' by associating a GRDDL profile to the specific patient 
> record XML vocabulary.


A figure of this "before GRDDL" and "with GRDDL" ways of working
would be particularly nice.

> Imagine a fellow assigned to determine a search criteria to identify a 
> patient population for a particular study.  He might have a set of 
> classifications specific to the study he could express as logical rules 
> (N3 rules).  Then, he could write a client (that understood 
> GRDDL) that speculatively picked a few patient records at random from a 
> remote server (as XML documents) each of which would be associated (by GRDDL 
> profile) to a transform to extract the clinical data as RDF (expressed in 
> a universally supported vocabulary for CPR - such as the HL7 OWL ontology 
> that Helen Chen from Agfa has been working on) and ask his 
> speculative questions of the resulting RDF graph.
>
> Or (to take the scenario a step further), apply the study specific rules 
> on the resulting RDF to classify the patient data according to his domain 
> of interest (specific diagnoses, pathological observations, etc..)

Bingo. That use case
  (1) is likely to be of interest to the healthcare/lifesci audience
and
  (2) motivates the use of GRDDL with XML vocabularies

Fabien, Danny, care to roll it in?

I'm tempted to do it myself... but I took an action to set up access
for Fabien. I think WebDAV might work out better for all concerned
than direct CVS/ssh access.
Let's see...
 from the WG homepage http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/grddl-wg/
 to the Art of Consensus Guide
 to the WebDAV docs http://www.w3.org/Guide/Jigedit/Webdav

Ah... I reached danny in #swig... 
http://chatlogs.planetrdf.com/swig/2006-08-17#T19-34-22

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Thursday, 17 August 2006 19:39:50 UTC