RE: Follow up: Clinical Observations Interoperability Telcon @ Tue Oct 30

> What concerns me is the way CDISC pick terms from many different
> concepts structures in NCIt, combine them into controlled terminologies,
> and use them as strings (submission values) in the Topic fields in
> SDTM records.
> (see http://www.w3.org/2007/11/NCIt_and_CDISC_CT.ppt)

[VK] I think you raise a very important issue. Clearly in some cases this
"combination" might really be nonsensical. The issue in front of us as a group
is:
(a) Do we continue or analysis by treating these "mixtures" to be true and worry
about them only if we can see that they are creating wrong results?
(b) Is there something we can specify in this combination of concept structures
into "string values" in our interoperability mappings? Will this help us in any
way?

Kerstin, I was wondering if we could make a list of these kinds of issues and
incorporate it in the functional requirements table? Let me know what you think.

> In your article about record/statement/domain level,
> http://owl-workshop.man.ac.uk/acceptedLong/submission_26.pdf,
> I think you call to this as the "database / record attitude".

[VK] Maybe Alan can explain this better. One way of looking at this could be is
that some one defined a mapping/transformation from a concept in the NCIT to a
string value in a database record.

The challenge in the above is that at best one can do "string matching" type of
things as all the semantics of the concepts are lost by the time they are stored
as "strings" in the CDISC database record. For meaningful automated inference we
would probably need to go back to the original conceptual representation? 

I think these are important issues and look forward to discussing them at
today's Telcon. 

Please e-mail us other such concerns and questions you have.

Thanks and Regards,

---Vipul


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Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2007 14:24:02 UTC