Re: New proposal: health & medical extensions to schema.org

The example you cite below would best modeled as a MedicalTrial. Basically,
a MedicalTrial is a controlled clinical trial in the traditional sense
(people recruited to study a particular intervention, divided into
treatment and control groups), whereas MedicalStudy is a more general
umbrella type that covers these and other kinds of studies, including
uncontrolled observational
studies<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_study>
(MedicalObservationalStudy)
like the Nurses' Health Study where a group of people are observed over a
period of time.

Does that help clarify? I'll look at making the documentation crisper here.

--Aaron


On Mon May 14 20:01:21 GMT-400 2012, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Which type to use for an instance such as:
> http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00587600?spons=%22Mayo+Clinic%22&spons_ex=Y&rank=7
>
>
> Mayo Clinic has 938 trials listed there currently, which I think could
> also be typed as a MedicalStudy<http://schemaorg-medicalext.appspot.com/MedicalStudy>
> .
>
> A bit confusing if each of those 938 listed would be either a MedicalStudy<http://schemaorg-medicalext.appspot.com/MedicalStudy> or
> a MedicalTrial <http://schemaorg-medicalext.appspot.com/MedicalTrial>.
>
> Does the mere fact that a Thing HAS A clinicaltrials.gov Identifer make
> it one over the other ?  It seems given your MedicalStudy description that
> those instances would be a MedicalStudy.  Example from above : NCT00587600
>
> Perhaps just more documentation is needed for Medical Trial <http://schemaorg-medicalext.appspot.com/MedicalTrial>itself to
> make the differences more apparent ?
>
> --
> -Thad
> http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry
>