Dear members of the list, I'd appreciate your opinions and guidance about a particular topic. As most of you probably know, the work in the ontology domain has been the flagship of semantic interoperability for many projects now, and there is a large amount of researchers active in the field. I've been involved in use of ontologies for semantic interoperability for the first time in 2002, and since then, ontologies have become a frequently pronounced solution for a large set of problems. However, I have a feeling that the nature of this work creates just a layer in the multilayer interoperability space. Expressing relationships among different entities and doing this in a formal way (OWL) is nice. OWL also allows you to do processing, reasoning on the defined relationships, but unless I'm missing something, this is all about relationships, and concepts. I mean the capabilities of OWL seem to be valid in the relationships is defines. What about the actual things, data items, entities that OWL links together? I've been a proponent of well defined type systems and object hieararchies in healthcare interoperability solutions, since I've spent years in the software development side of the domain, and a huge number of issues arise from the developers interpreting losely defined types, or inventing their own types. Now pinning down concepts either by using terminologies or ontologies is good. It is good to know that two fields on two different data structures are pointing to the same concept. This however, is the beginning of the process. Pointing at the same thing and processing it in the same way are different things. Just because we agree that we are pointing to body temperature in two different documents does not stop us from processing one of them with a double, and the other one with a float. There is a great deal of information out there expressed in the form of OWL, or other formalisms, but I can't see this covering all aspects of interoperability, but (no offense) there is a large crowd out there who think they have solved the problem of semantic interoperability. Though it may be an undervaluation of the work, "mappings" are nice, but they don't ease the rest of the work, where mapped items are processed in different domains. Are there resources or works that you know of, that try to link type systems in openEHR or other formalisms like 13606 or HL7 to these semantic expressions? How does a DVQuantity instance and an OWL expression play together?
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