- From: Drew McDermott <drew.mcdermott@yale.edu>
- Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:36:17 -0400
- To: public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
> [Chimezie Ogbuji]
>
> Seems to me the biggest barrier is in coming to a consensus on
> an appropriate placeholder vocabulary and not neccessarily on determining
> all the various ways in which a person (and their related data) could be
> expressed in a patient record.
I'm not sure I'm agreeing or disagreeing with Chimezie (it depends on
what's meant by "consensus" here), but I'd like to emphasize a point
others have made in this discussion: Deciding to use a particular
ontology is not like deciding who to marry. It's just a _vocabulary_.
You can mix and match terms from different vocabularies, and you can
make up a new class that's the intersection of two classes from
different ontologies.
Of course you don't want to (a) misuse an ontology; (b) duplicate what
someone else has already done. But it seems to me that if FOAF
includes a term for Person (defined as broadly as Dan Brickley says it
is), then everyone in the world might as well use foaf:Person when
they want to talk about persons. If a person in a medical context has
special properties, then subclass foaf:Person. If you discover at
some point that you (or HL7 RIM) has produced a class equivalent to
one defined previously, then declare them equivalent (owl:sameAs).
[It seems to me that it would be good practice to use the earliest
defined term for something, partly out of courtesy and partly so
everyone will converge on the same term, but that's an orthogonal
issue.]
--
-- Drew McDermott
Yale Computer Science Department
Received on Thursday, 14 September 2006 17:36:34 UTC