- From: Matthias Samwald <matthias.samwald@meduniwien.ac.at>
- Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 07:08:38 +0100
- To: public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
Dear all, I have hardly participated in any of the calls lately and am coming at this as a bit of an outsider. From my reading it indeed seems that any officially accepted RDF version of FHIR data would use a code + code system representation of 'concepts' from controlled vocabularies / ontologies. In this case, however, I doubt that the added benefit of having an RDF version is rather minimal and does not outweigh the added complexity of an additional representation besides XML and JSON. The potential benefit of FHIR over other existing approaches (such as some previous HL7 standards) is simplicity and accessibility through standard tooling. The potential benefits of an RDF/OWL representation of health data are bridging the data model-terminology gap, an intuitive representation of medical information and easy querying and interlinking of the resulting data via intuitive SPARQL queries. I hope I'm wrong, but my impression is that a simple, mostly syntactic mapping of FHIR in RDF might end up having neither of these qualities, combining the worst rather than the best of both worlds. A more sophisticated mapping, on the other hand, might not allow round-tripping the data and would probably not be accepted as part of the official FHIR project. Am I overly sceptical here? With kind regards, Matthias Samwald Am 21.12.2014 00:15, schrieb Lloyd McKenzie: > Well, for FHIR at a minimum, you must be able to round-trip > instances. And what will appear in the JSON and XML instances is the > code + code system (and often multiple code-code system pairs). > Often, the code + code system won't even link to an ontology that's > known by the receiver. And if we want to be able to convert v2 or v3 > instances, what appears over the wire there is the code + code system > too. All knowledge of what the binding is for an element is carried > outside the instance. > > -------------------------------------- > Lloyd McKenzie > > +1-780-993-9501 -- Assistant Professor Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics, and Intelligent Systems Medical University of Vienna http://samwald.info/
Received on Sunday, 21 December 2014 06:09:09 UTC