Re: An argument for bridging information models and ontologies at the syntactic level

On Apr 3, 2008, at 7:56 PM, Kashyap, Vipul wrote:
>
> OK, we disagree on this point. I'd just point out that, if you are  
> interested in working with HL7 RIM or BRIDG, you have a conceptual  
> mismatch with them.
> [VK] I do not view it as a conceptual mismatch as I can get Snomed- 
> CT the terminology by specifying a transformation on Snomed-CT the  
> information model.
Perhaps you can elaborate on your idea of SNOMEDCT the information and  
what kind of transformations are involved to get SNOMEDCT the  
terminology.

>
> If your Acute MI is a subclass of Observation/Problem, then  
> instances of "Acute MI" class are observations of Acute MI, not  
> instances of the disease MI. An "observation" does not have  
> severity, location, and so on. You lose the ability to talk about  
> properties of the things in the world.  An information model refers  
> to codes not because of implementation concern, but because  
> component parts of informational entity are also informational  
> entities, IMHO.
> [VK] Would like to separate the issue of incorrect modeling from the  
> issue of including class analogs of terminological codes into an  
> information model in general.
> As far as severity, location, etc are concerned, these could be  
> implemented as qualifiers to the observations as proposed in the  
> Clinical Element Model approach by Stan Huff et. al.
> That said, the issue is not that of accuracy in modeling as I used  
> Acute MI as an example. was proposing an information architecture  
> where we create a common framework to model and perform inference on  
> information models and terminologies.
>
>
Several years ago, I tried to formulate the Clinical Element Model as  
an ontology without any success. I came to see it as a very flexible  
data structure for encoding information. If you have better luck  
formulating it as an ontology, I'd like to know about it.

Thank you.

Samson