>Thomas, > >I disagree. > >I disagree because in essence both are the same. It is in the richness >versus reduced richness that there is a difference. And that difference is >not major. ... >A rich ontology is better than a restricted code set. > >Gerard
Hi, I am not certain that we are talking about the very same things. Lets take your comparison between very accurate free text and a vague free text : both are of the same kind, with the former bearing more information, but both use the same langage, probably with a reduced term set for the second. Anyway both use terms with a semantic. Let's say, in the "structured world" that they use the same ontology, but one mode uses only a part of it. If the definition of an ontology is "something that can be used to describe", Tom's definition of a Level 0 ontology is "a set of terms + a semantic network". In short, it means "in order to describe, you must provide a semantic". Some coding systems may be able to be incorporated into a semantic system ; in that case, I agree with Gerard that using one such system or a rich ontology is just a choice of the right level of granularity. However, I think I can give strong evidences that classifications cannot, by construction, be incorporated inside a semantic network since each of their codes represents an artificial domain delimited by the inclusion and exclusion criterions. Lets take a comparison with geography : you can build an ontology in order to describe natural objects (mountains, rivers...), but if you build artificial frontiers, and call it countries, you cannot semantically include these concepts inside the geographical domain (that is the very reason why human beings, very frustrated, had to invent the political domain ;-) ) I think that there is the same difference in medicine between ontologies and classifications that, in the geographical domain, between geography and politics : you can "describe" the political frontiers using the geography ontologie, but the political objects belong to another domain. Tom might answer that the word Australia is an example of a term that is shared between geography and politic, but I can't imagine another concept of the kind. As a summary of this (too long) message, I would say that the problem comes from the definition of the term "coding" : does it mean "coding in order to describe" or "coding in order to classify" ? Best regards, Philippe - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
