Re: Wait a sec...What about the HL7 RIM An Universal Exchange Language

Good discussion on this thread...And timely...since more advanced 
business process orchestrations for web services and other internet 
technologies are penetrating the market. This gives an opportunity for 
newer implementation technologies like OWL and RDF to enhance the 
execution of business processes over the Internet.

On model-based development and its relationship to the HL7 
RIM...Remember that the RIM is not expressed at its core as XML. The HL7 
RIM is based at its core on two symbols, one for physical entities and 
one for the processes or activities that modify physical entities or 
capture the state of physical entities at a given point at time. The use 
of these two symbols in the HL7 RIM is especially valuable in the modern 
IT environment, which focuses on more easily manipulating business 
processes for cost and quality improvement and on increasing 
accountability for people's actions.

How the values in a given instance are associated with these two symbols 
in a particular implementation, whether the rather old-fashioned XML ITS 
of CDA and V3 messages or more modern XML implementations like RDF or 
OWL, or better implementations than RDF and OWL can support in the 
future are really just features of the decade we work in...These two 
symbols in the RIM trace back to to 8000 BC. Whatever we call them, 
under what language name we call them, won't change the world of 
physical entities and processes that we are representing.

So to make this discussion valuable, we should be discussing how to make 
the transition from older XML ITS to more modern XML ITS(s), optimized 
for the business processes they are intended to support. We need to 
continue to improve the ability for implementation technology to support 
model-based technology. But we shouldn't get confused by assuming that 
the implementation technology is the same thing as the model, as I've 
seen in some of the discussion on this thread regarding the core HL7 model.

Dan



On 12/17/2010 2:47 AM, dirk.colaert@agfa.com wrote:
>
> I want to comment on:
> <<i also agree, in a sense, with this.  HL7 messages capture 
> information as a
> whole, as an entity, so in that representation it is also true that 
> semantic
> web technologies would have a hard time, as is, making sense of them 
> because
> semantic web technologies wants a fact by fact representation, e.g. triple
> store.>>
> This is not really true. Separate triples in a file/message/document 
> are logical ANDs, they belong together as an entity. Moreover, you can 
> link different elements with properties, which are again separate 
> triples. So, OWL, certainly OWL Full is perfectly capable of capturing 
> any chunk of instance data.
>
> Dirk Colaert
> Afga HealthCare
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *  Van: *Michael Miller [mmiller@systemsbiology.org]
> *  Verzonden: *2010-12-15 08:47 PST
> *  Aan: *Peter.Hendler@kp.org; twclark@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
> *  Cc: *public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org; public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org
> *  Onderwerp: *RE: Wait a sec...What about the HL7 RIM An Universal 
> Exchange Language
>
>
> hi all,
>
> "unambiguous identifier for "things""
>
> i agree, this has been a known issue for many years (as you well know, 
> tim) but its importance is just now growing as multi-omics studies and 
> sharing of EHR records is becoming more common.
>
> "It is HL7 V3"
>
> i also agree, in a sense, with this.  HL7 messages capture information 
> as a whole, as an entity, so in that representation it is also true 
> that semantic web technologies would have a hard time, as is, making 
> sense of them because semantic web technologies wants a fact by fact 
> representation, e.g. triple store.
>
> as a software developer i've found both view points useful depending 
> on the task at hand.  some applications present themselves as better 
> able to relate entities as a whole with each other (typical OO 
> designs) where as others that want to relate entities to each other to 
> discover similarities and differences lend themselves to the semantic 
> web approach.  yes, one can try to force semantic web technologies on 
> applications that involve live workflow pipelines and one could write 
> applications to try and search over HL7 XML formats and they would 
> work to some degree but i think there is a place for both approaches.
>
> i also feel that it wouldn't be hard to present HL7 messages as 
> meaningful triple stores, especially since they make extensive use of 
> controlled vocabularies.
>
> cheers,
>
> michael
>
> *From:* public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org 
> <mailto:public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org> 
> [mailto:public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org 
> <mailto:public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org>] *On Behalf Of 
> *Peter.Hendler@kp.org <mailto:Peter.Hendler@kp.org>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, December 15, 2010 8:18 AM
> *To:* markw@illuminae.com <mailto:markw@illuminae.com>
> *Cc:* public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org 
> <mailto:public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>; 
> public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org 
> <mailto:public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org>; 
> twclark@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu <mailto:twclark@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu>
> *Subject:* Wait a sec...What about the HL7 RIM An Universal Exchange 
> Language
>
>
> The PCAST did not take into consideration (maybe they don't even know) 
> there is an universal exchange language for healthcare.  It is HL7 V3. 
>  The CDA is merely one of virtually infinite structures that can be 
> constructed from the RIM.  The meta information as well as the 
> clinical data is unambiguously represented by RIM.  There is no reason 
> to ignore the thousands of man years that went into designing the RIM. 
>  The RIM Based Application Architecture  (RIMBAA) work group at HL7 
> has had many demonstrations of RIM based applications.  We don't need 
> to re invent the wheel.  CDA is only one particular RIM structure 
> designed for one particular use case.  Those of us who have been 
> working at HL7 for years are blown away by the suggestion that there 
> needs to be a different wheel invented.
>
>
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>
> *Mark <markw@illuminae.com <mailto:markw@illuminae.com>>*
> Sent by: public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org 
> <mailto:public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org>
>
> 12/14/2010 06:44 PM
>
>  
>
> To
>
>  
>
> "Tim Clark" <twclark@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu 
> <mailto:twclark@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu>>
>
> cc
>
>  
>
> public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org <mailto:public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
>
> Subject
>
>  
>
> Re: An Universal Exchange Language
>
>
>  
>
>
>
>
> But seriously, Tim, if we were to pursue this problem, we would need some
> form of unambiguous identifier for "things"... and given the distributed
> nature of the biomedical domain, we'd want to make sure that there was
> some way of resolving that identifier to obtain metadata about it from a
> variety of disparate sources who might have very different information -
> clinical, molecular, demographic, etc...
>
> hmmmm....
>