RE: Versioning vs Temporal modeling of Patient State

> my experience is that issues of versioning are quite different from the
> issues of temporal modeling. Often in the former case, we don't have to
> concern ourselves with what changes have taken place, whereas in the
> latter
> case, we often need to focus on the changes themselves (i.e., questions of
> what changes, how, and *when* are critical).

[VK] That is a good way to distinguish the issues. Unfortunately, the few use
cases that were provided to me suggested issues of versioning were confounded
with issues of temporal data modeling. 

The latter notion of versioning is from the content management perspective,
where the notion of what.why,who changed it is important, i.e., provenance.

This underlines the need for a clear definition of versioning and provenance in
the life sciences context.

> This is an old and difficult problem with systems employing complex
> representations of the world. It is often not sufficient to operate within
> a
> mere snapshot of the world. One has to ask whether time (or the changes
> over
> time) matter, or whether at any moment it is sufficient to consider a
> snapshot.

[VK] The key is how you support this functional requirement. Either you could
create an appropriate temporal model that provides the framework acquisition and
querying of this data; or
you could fall back on versioning functionality to get this information.
IMHO, there is more value in taking the former approach as it can be fed into
versioning systems that compute the changes or "diffs"

> One might draw analogies to "compile-time vs. run-time" considerations
> often
> occurring in computer science... in fact, the question of "class changes
> vs.
> instance changes" is exactly that.

[VK] Agree. However whether an instance is actually changing or whether a
particular property of the individual is naturally modeled as a dynamic time
varying data type need to be identified.

> BTW, there is a paper that points out that temporal modeling/reasoning is
> re-invented/re-implemented over and over because of the lack of "built-in"
> support for it in KR systems:
> 
> Thomas L. Dean and Drew McDermott. Temporal Data Base Management.
> Artificial
> Intelligence, 32(1):1­55, 1987.

[VK] Thanks for the above info.

---Vipul




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Received on Friday, 12 January 2007 15:25:08 UTC