Re: An argument for bridging information models and ontologies at the syntactic level

At 10:46 AM -0400 4/21/08, Dan Russler wrote:
>Peter and Vipul...See below...dan
>
>Kashyap, Vipul wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>IMHO, codes don't represent classes in some information model. An 
>>information model has classes like Observation, whose instances are 
>>clinical statements made by some entity (person or machine). I 
>>think information model is "meta" in the sense that its instances 
>>are statements  
>>[VK] This the reason I think theHL7 is a meta-model rather than an 
>>Information Model. Of course this depends on the viewpoint you take 
>>and the information architecture you adopt.
>>
><dan> With apologies to Peter in case I misrepresented your SOA 
>presentation...Last week, Peter Elkin of Mayo Clinic delivered a 
>presentation where he called the HL7 RIM a "first order ontology" 
>because of the abstraction level of the RIM. He called the models 
>derived from the RIM, e.g. analytic models, patient care document 
>models like CDA, etc, "second order ontology" because they add a 
>layer of concreteness to the abstractions of the RIM, i.e. an object 
>with classCode of observation and moodCode of order becomes an 
>"observation order object" with neither a classCode nor a moodCode. 
>Finally, the coding systems themselves support the concreteness of a 
>"third order ontology." For example, the SNOMED concept becomes an 
>object itself without a code attribute, moodCode attribute, or 
>classCode attribute, e.g. a WBC order. />


AAArgh, can I plead that we do NOT use this terminology in this way? 
The "first/second/higher-order" terminology already has a firmly 
established and very precise use to refer to types of logic, and 
hence of ontology languages. Just don't say 'order'. Use some other 
word, please. Thanks.

Pat Hayes


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