HL7/W3C FHIR/RDF properties

 Dear,

I've been studying the current version of FHIR RDF ("Structural Ontology")
serialized as TTL ( http://build.fhir.org/fhir.ttl ) and I identified two
issues regarding the properties:

(1) I wonder why each object property was specialized according the source
"concept" (term)? For example:
- "fhir:AllergyIntolerance.reaction.description"
- "fhir:Account.description"
- "fhir:ActivityDefinition.description"

In my opinion, this has the advantage of organizing and specializing the
property for each concept, i.e. the "description" property of
ActivityDefinition has different semantics (meaning) of the "description"
property of Account. On the other hand, with this approach we make the
ontology more complex (bigger), lose extensibility and knowledge discovery.
A simple example: if you want to query all objects that has description
"XPTO" you'll need to specify each ".description" in the SPARQL (as
commonly done in relational DB/SQL).

This is not limited to the properties ".description", there are plenty of
other examples, e.g. location, note, created, comment, identifier, etc.


(2) A common approach in ontology engineering is to reuse predicates from
other ontologies, as in [1], especially the ones that are standardized
(e.g. from W3C, RDFS, Dublin Core, etc). For example, "description",
"title", "issued", etc are properties already standardized within DC terms (
http://dublincore.org/2012/06/14/dcterms). Why not reusing these properties
instead of creating new ones? Ultimately, this can improve the
interoperability capability of the ontology. I understand when we need to
specialize a property for something specific of the health domain, but
anyway, in this case we can still use a standardized property and
specialize it, e.g. if there is the specific limit of text length of
"fhir:DocumentReference.description", we can specialize it as a
"dc:description" and add an axiom limiting the text size.


- ACTION:
I propose to: (a) make a list of the properties that have the same meaning
in FHIR; (b) check whether these properties are already provided in other
standardized ontologies; and (c) discuss how to change the FHIR RDF
ontology, i.e. exchange the existing properties for the ones found.


Best regards,

João Moreira
University of Twente


[1]
https://github.com/DTL-FAIRData/FAIRDataPoint/wiki/FAIR-Data-Point-Specification


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