RE: A question on the vocabulary for 'persons'

An important issue that is likely to come up soon in healthcare is the
integration of a person's genetic information in the electronic medical record.

 

So, would it make sense to extend the person class to hold a person's genomic
information?

 

Another big issue is one of privacy. How does one specify ACLs related to what
fields of the person class be visible to which classes of users?

Maybe we need another ontology there?

 

---Vipul

 

________________________________

From: public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of helen.chen@agfa.com
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2006 8:08 AM
To: kei.cheung@yale.edu
Cc: Marco Brandizi; public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org;
public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org
Subject: Re: A question on the vocabulary for 'persons'

 


Kei 

You raised a good point here.   

Indeed, person can have multiple roles in a given organization or scenario.
Capturing this multiplicity in the "person" ontology should not be a problem -
you simply add a triple for each role the person assumes.   

These roles are likely to change over time, as you point out in your email.
Such changes should not be a problem, just as  one might change their home
addresses.   As with your home address, you can add "effectiveUntil" and
"effecitiveOn" to specify the valid period of this information.  In addition, a
role is only meaningful within a scope.  In HL7, it uses "scopedRole" and
"playedRole" to set this context.  This, too, can be modelled in ontology. 

My problem is with the so-called "participation".  Participation is similar to
"role" but might change in each episode.  For example, Dr. K is a chest
specialist (Role) in hospital A.  He is sick today and is treated at hospital A.
So in such "patient-encounter" episode, he is a patient (Participation).   

I am not sure if the person ontology should concern such transitional concepts. 

Helen 




kc28 <kei.cheung@yale.edu> 
Sent by: public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org 

09/13/2006 09:45 PM 

To

Marco Brandizi <brandizi@ebi.ac.uk> 

cc

public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org 

Subject

Re: A question on the vocabulary for 'persons'

 

 

 






Hi Marco et al.,

It is also possible that a person can have multiple roles (e.g., 
researcher and teacher). Are there standard vocabularies that we can use 
to describe roles, for example? There might be a temporal aspect as 
well. For example, a person at one point was a postdoc but later became 
a professor. If this is taken into account, we can ask questions like 
what is the most recent role(s) a person has. This may somewhat relates 
to how we should model a paitent/subject involved in a longitudinal 
studies. Besides relations (how persons relate to each other), we might 
also want to think about how persons are grouped for different 
basic/clinical research purposes. For examples, panels vs. cohorts, 
population samples vs. pedigrees, etc... This might have been 
thought/discussed about by other people. I may just reignite such 
thought and discussion.

Cheers,

-Kei

Marco Brandizi wrote:

>
> kei cheung wrote:
>
>> Based on my limited experience, a person in the life science and 
>> healthcare context can be considered as a subject or patient (which
>> can be a subclass of person). Of course, there are other roles a
>> person can play (e.g., doctors, researchers, and authors). For
>> genetic studies, a group of subjects/indviduals may be a
>> family/pedigree. In this case, relationships among these  family
>> members may include Father_of, Mother_of, Child_of, etc. Other types
>
>
> Hi Kei,
>
> In addition, I think there is another side as well: science community
> people, having a role (student, teacher, director of), relations with
> fields of study ( immunologist, studies TLR signalling), relations with
> events and scientific production ( has published, has organized
> conference ), relations with other people ( works with, supervisor of,
> ... ).
>
> I vaguely remember at least one similar case of ontology, does anyone
> have further details?
>
> Cheers.
>