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

 


	IMHO, codes don't represent classes in some information model. An
information model has classes like Observation, whose instances are clinical
statements made by some entity (person or machine). I think information model is
"meta" in the sense that its instances are statements  
	[VK] This the reason I think theHL7 is a meta-model rather than an
Information Model. Of course this depends on the viewpoint you take and the
information architecture you adopt.
	 
	 (The observation that "John has diabetes") about something that happens
in the real world (the person named John has an instance of Diabetes).  In BFO
term, the observation is an instance of information-content-entity, as opposed
to an assertion about the John instance of Person and an instance of Diabetes.
	[VK] While not disagreeing with the above, here is one way to model it
in terms of multi-layer representation
	 
	Oberrvation = MetaClass
	Instances of Observation MetaClass = DiabetesObservation Class = The set
of statements that A Person has Diabetes
	Instances of DiabetesObservation Class = The statement "John has
Diabetes"
	 
	The fundamental issue here is that in the HL7/RIM contains a filed
called Observation.code which will be assigned the code for the class Diabetes
in Snomed, etc.
	

	 I don't understand how a class of HbA1c can be an instance of the RIM
Observation class.  I don't see how the Observation class having the value field
is the issue.
	 
	Observation.code = Code for HbA1c
	Observation,value = Value for HbA1c
	 
	One way of looking at the HL7/RIM as a meta-model is aa follows:
	Observation = MetaClass
	Instances of Observation MetaClass = HbA1cObservation Class = The set of
HbA1c observation for a given person
	Instances of the HbA1c Class = The Value for HbA1c for John at a given
point in time.
	 
	So one could view the HL7/RIM as an EAV model (Entity = Observation.code
= HbA1c, Attribute = Observation.value, Value = Actual value)
	which "serializes" or represents this multi-layer represntation.
	 
	Hope that clarifies this modeling approach.
	 
	Cheers,
	 
	---Vipul
	 


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