RE: Evidence

> As I elaborated on in a previous message, I don't buy the claim that
> a workaround is necessary in the case of evidence as process as a
> role. The statement simply doesn't make sense in BFO and my call for
> a definition of what it would mean went unanswered.

[VK] In the case of a process, the issue fundamentally is whether it is a
continuant or occurrent.  Whereas biological processes appear to be occurrents
computational processes appear to be continuants. 

I do lack knowledge of the nuances of BFO, but from a 10,000 ft level
it is not clear to me the value of modeling a process as an occurrent.

So, in some sense, it fails your acceptance test: understandability..
And here I mean understandability in the sense of application to real
world use cases.

It also fails another acceptance test, doesn't help me to represent the notion
of a computational process easily....

And I suspect similar utility issues will arise with the others as well, DOLCE,
OpenCyc, ...
 
> I totally with you on us all agreeing, durably. This has worked for
> BFO in OBI so far. 

[VK] Yes, it may have, but then the clinical types in HCLS would view it ss a
siloized approach and issues start coming up when we try to use BFO.

> This one I find harder to evaluate, for some reason. As I've said, my
> bias is that I think distinctions are usually good and we need more
> rather than less of them. I'm worried that absent having them it's
> too easy to say things that don't have a consequence, or for which
> the consequence is not clear. I'd say this is an area that I need to
> learn more about.

[VK] I guess then the acceptance test would be: Are the entailments that are
inferred as a result of having these distinctions useful? Hope that makes it
clearer ... :)

> > Acceptance Test 2: Ability to express my information needs without
> > jumping
> > through hoops>?
> don't know what this means

[VK] I had the use case of "computational process" in mind.... Had to go through
some gyrations there. I guess the issue there was a lack of clear
methodology to apply these constructs.

> > Acceptance Test 3: Ability to align with other "standards"
> not necessarily interesting. Depends on what you think of the other
> standards.

[VK] What I meant here is that there are existing standards within Healthcare,
e.g., HL7 - RIM, Snomed, LOINC, etc. So alignment would be good.
Also, mis-alignment would be good if it exposes gaps and weaknesses in these
existing standards, in that they do not support some use cases.

> Ideally you evaluate these by having some problem to solve, then
> trying to use the system to solve the problem and then seeing how
> well it did. This is hard work and I don't know of any shortcut.

[VK] Alan you have been the driving force of the HCLS demo and in some sense you
are best positioned to come up with an interesting use case from the biological
world, probably related to evidence. And then we can work it through.

I can put forward a use case from the clinical world. It is centered around the
aspect of judgements/assessments a nurse makes in the process of nursing care
and the pieces of evidence he/she requires to make that assessment.

> Maybe we can bring this back to the main subject: What problems are
> we trying to solve by recording evidence? What are the ways we would
> know that we've made a mistake?

[VK] IMHO, the key issue is that the process of assessment/judgement be
predictable, i.e., given the same set of evidence and the same context, one
should be able to reproduce the same conclusions.

The other requirement would be the ability to explain why a particular ssessment
was made. Most statistical reasoning systems are weak in this regards....

Some others may come up with other requirements.

---Vipul





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Received on Thursday, 21 June 2007 12:28:24 UTC