Re: Clinical terminologies to OWL

Hello John,

On 7/24/08 1:35 PM, "John Madden" <john.madden@me.com> wrote:

> Hey Chime,
> 
> Thanks for coming up with this project task proposal relating to
> conversion of legacy terminologies to OWL/RDF, it's very exciting.

No problem.  And BTW, I've added a Wiki for this particular task proposal:

http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG/Project_Ideas/MappingHealthCareTerminologyToO
WL

Please feel free to contribute, comment, and/or add your name if you are
interested in participating.

> (Actually, I think very domain-specific ontolgies have, as a rule, the
> strongest likelihood of short-term practical utility.)

Absolutely.

> We (Mary and I) have an ongoing project involving cancer reporting for
> public health where I've always dreamed of producing an OWL/RDF
> adaptation of content culled from a variety of sources including
> SNOMED CT, and also others. Unlike the NIH cancer ontology which
> includes a lot of biosicence related content, we'd focus exclusively
> on supporting routine clinical aspects of cancer care.
> 
> I'd love to make this a use case. It does involve modeling some
> "utility" classes and relations (like Patient, Physician, etc.) but
> I'd like to move that stuff out into some more generic project.

Would you mind adding a brief description of this to the use case section of
the Wiki?

> (As Vipul knows, modeling that stuff always involves taking
> appropriate cognizance of constitutencies at HL7, CDISC, CaBIG, etc.

Yes.  As is the case with COI, the best scenario would be one where the
results of such a task would be literature that feeds back (directly) to
these standards organizations.

> P.S. w.r.t SNOMED CT, to just clarify the point I in the call today
> about whether there would ever be an OWL-SNOMED: the expressivity of
> the DL underlying SNOMED is roughly on a par with that of RDFS. It is
> far less expressive than OWL. I could therefore imagine an RDF-SNOMED,
> but not an OWL-SNOMED.

I believe SNOMED-CT involves *some* Description Logic forms that require OWL
expressiveness (the most common being existential restrictions -
owl:someValuesFrom)

> Anyway, unlike RDF/S, SNOMED has never had a published formal
> semantics, and certainly not a model-theoretic one like RDF/OWL's.
> (Indeed, the absence of an explicit model-theoretic semantics makes
> the claim that SNOMED is DL-based at all pretty fuzzy-wuzzy.

Yes, and the fallout of this imprecision could be something that such an
effort can expound on within the context of 'real world' use cases.

-- Chimezie


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Received on Thursday, 24 July 2008 21:18:35 UTC