Re: Minutes of last week's (Dec 2) HL7 ITS RDF Subgroup / W3C HCLS COI call -- Review of FHIR ontology approaches (cont.)

Hi Vipul,

On 12/20/2014 06:35 PM, Vipul Kashyap wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback and clarification  – Looks like we will have to
> work at two different layers:
>
> 1.The syntactic translation from FHIR XML/JSON to RDF/OWL –
>
> 2.Enrichment of the RDF/OWL representation via ontologies and OWL
> axioms.. which is where I believe would provide the value due to
> inferencing in a wide variety of applications –e.g., CDS, Clinical
> Documentation, Quality Metrics, etc.
>
> Am I correct in assuming that we are focusing on (1) in this group –
> Shouldn’t we try to do (2) as well?

I think it depends on what you mean in #2.  I think fundamentally two 
things are needed:

  A. To define mappings that translate between FHIR XML/JSON instance 
data and FHIR RDF instance data; and

  B. To define a FHIR ontology that can be used in conjunction with FHIR 
RDF instance data, to help interpret that data's meaning.  For example, 
this would define the classes and properties in which FHIR RDF instance 
data is expressed.

These two things work hand-in-hand of course.  However, B does not 
necessarily -- out of the box -- need to include much in the way of 
upper ontology concepts.  (That could be a design choice.)  Instead, 
upper ontology concepts could be linked in separately for specific uses.

David Booth

Received on Sunday, 21 December 2014 00:45:38 UTC