RE: Multi-layered Knowledge Representations for Healthcare (was RE: An argument for bridging information models and ontologies at the syntactic level)

 

	I agree with you below, except I think it's peoples' "interpretation" of
the RIM that causes the confusion, e.g. "The focus of the RIM classes had
primarily been structure and not semantics." Since RIM is communicated in UML,
UML semantic rules apply, and one needs to be strict on the UMLsemantics  in
order to interpret the RIM.
	[VK] Also, one needs to be make sure that the semantics of the various
classes in the RIM, e.g., Observation are consistent with the semantics of the
UML constructs being used. Furthermore, these semantics/definitions of the
various classes should be properly
	defined in the RIM specs. 
	
	One way to think of "structure" is to think of the "structure" of a
definition in a dictionary, i.e. meaning one, meaning two, etc. Then think of
UML as another kind of structure for definitions, i.e. a class representing a
concept sets up a definition structure of attributes, associations, and state
transitions that define the concept (analogous to the linguistic structure of
"meaning one" in a dictionary).
	[VK] I think this is a stretch. Clearly there is widely accepted
connotation of the word "structure". A better approach would be to introduce the
notion of semantics and differentiate it from structure explicitly across the
RIM Specs. 
	
	I think that revisiting the RIM definitions and RIM UML diagrams and
rethinking of them as complementary "definitions of concepts" rather than
introducing set theory and other data management tasks into the UML
interpretation would be helpful.
	[VK] I agree with the above, except that set theory is a very useful
mathematical tool to concretely specify the semantics of various artifacts and
has been broadly used in Computer Science. Also agree with separation of data
management issues from information modeling
	issues. 
	 
	Seems to me that we need to do this exercise at least for a few use
cases, before we proceed on our attempts at determining semantic conformance.
	 
	---Vipul


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