Re: [VM] Natasha and Alan

At 12:37 +0100 10/28/04, Alan Rector wrote:
>Thomas
>
>I am something of a stand-in for the experience of the medical 
>community.  There are several relevant  groups to point at although 
>I am not in a position to write a definitive paper on any of them:
>
>SNOMED-CT (and its ancestor in the UK Clinical Terms) - the 
>officially mandated terminology
>
>  HL7 (the main healthcare information standards body) Vocabulary 
>group which manages a variety of terminologies.
>
>The National Cancer Institute's Metathesaurus
>
>The Unified Medical Language system
>
>The Gene Ontology and the Open Bio Ontologies (OBO) group more generally.
>
>In all these cases the interest would be in the principles, issues 
>and use cases encountered, e.g. tracking versions, handling of 
>retired terms, handling of splitting and joining terms, when a 
>change of a label indicates a new concept, etc.  None of them use 
>URIs as identifiers.  HL7 uses OIDs, SNOMED has its own system of 64 
>bit - or perhaps now more - identifiers partitioned up so as to 
>allow a name-space like construct.  All make a sharp separation 
>between 'concept' and 'term', and use separate 'nonsemantic' 
>identifiers for each.   All use "pre-web" technology.
>

[snip]

Actually, there is a version of the NCI metathesaurus in OWL that is 
starting to get some use - a short paper about it appeared in the 
Journal of Web Semantics 
(http://www.mindswap.org/papers/WebSemantics-NCI.pdf) and a longer 
paper has been submitted to the Journal of Biomedical Informatics 
which desribes the DL work and the new OWL version.
  Anyway, based on my work with NCI, I suspect many people with large 
vocabularies wouild be interested in learning how to move them to 
standardized forms, would be interested in the advantages thereof 
(standard toolkits, HTTP-based serving of terms, linking of other 
sources to large vocabularies) and would be looking for examples to 
follow.
  I think the VM document would be very useful to a number of 
communities (not just medical) if it included some discussion of how 
online vocabularies have been used (to encourage people to move them 
online), how a standard form is useful (both for reasoning and for 
sharing) and what sort of tools can be taken advantage of if the 
vocabularies are moved to Semantic Web formats.
  Thomas' outline has this covered, and I think the work Alan 
discussed in his note (all these online vocabularies) are important 
to point out in the first part of the argument -- why an online 
vocabulary is important and useful   (and, if Alan were willing, he's 
one of the World's experts on that and a page or two from him on that 
could be useful in this document)
  -JH
-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler 
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742