On 11/03/2010 17:07, Fabrice Camous wrote: > Thanks Stef, > > It's a nice paper indeed, and it formulates the confusions I had about > SNOMED, which is covering different perspectives of the medical reality. > But this leads me to questions I have precisely about the bindings of > the ontology part of the archetype. They may need to be more specific. > Depending on what ontology we bind to (and here I include everything > documenting reality, a reality including models, archetypes, > everything!), the binding will have different meanings. For example, > let's say we have an archetype node at0000 which we name "blood > pressure" in an openEHR.OBSERVATION archetype and we wish to bind this >
I should point out that this name is already not well chosen, and ontologists should be getting involved in the review process to correct such errors. The correct concept here is "systemic arterial blood pressure recording" or something very similar... > node to an external terminology. I can see three kinds of bindings: > 1) Let us assume that there is, available to us, an ontology of > information-bearer (or information container) entities, the development > of which is so advanced that there is actually a type of such > information-bearer entities which corresponds perfectly to the recording > of a blood pressure observation, the so-called "perfect match". And by > that I'm not saying that the ontology also indicates that such a type > has whole-part relationships with recording of systolic blood pressure > observation, etc, which is another problem. Well even if this "perfect > match" exists, and since the paper introduced by Stef mentions the > realist ontological approach (OBO, BFO), I will use their distinctions > and say that the EHR is about particulars (instances) and the > information-bearer ontology about universals (types, categories, kinds). > Therefore, the binding here is a relationship which we would call > "instance-of". Note that OBO also develops an ontology of relationships > (RO, http://www.obofoundry.org/ro/) where you can find an "instance_of" > relationship. > 2) Now let's consider that the ontology we want to bind our at0000 node > to describes observations, but not their recording. important point: the difference between concepts describing information recording concepts versus concepts describing real world phenomena (other than information recording, which is of course in a general sense also part of the real world). Some of these points have been made at http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/ontol/Ontologies+Home - I encourage people who spend time in this area to improve this page, add to it, criticise it etc. > It means that the > ontology encountered in 1) was documenting the recording of observations > (which, I think, is what an obervation archetype does). In this case we > can not use "instance-of", but something like "recording-of" if it > exists in the relation ontology. Note that technically, we should > probably bind to the particular instance of the blood pressure > observation, not directly to the type (category, universal). We may have > to compose/coordinate relationships. Something like "recording-of" + > "instance-of". > I would agree with this, and I still think upper level ontologies have not properly taken care of this aspect of reality being reflected in recordings on media. > 3) Finally let's say that we have available an ontology which is not > about the information-bearer entities, not about observations, but about > "dependent continuants" (entities which endure, but depend on another > entity for existing) which we observe, for example qualities, such as > the blood pressure is the quality of a human, or a blood system. We need > an "observation-of" relationship, and the final binding will look like > "recording-of" + "observation-of" + "instance-of". > interesting analysis... > The relationships help the system to make sense of the meaning pointed > to in the archetype ontology and thus actually use the > reasoning/knowledge available externally. Is there a way to integrate > them in the AOM? > * * at the moment we can declare a binding of an internal code such as the at0000 code in an archetype to an external code phrase. Currently this is starting to be used to map archetype node codes to Snomed and other terminology codes. I think to achieve what you are saying here, there needs to be an ontology of information concepts in which there is a node defined as follows: * concept 11111111 o description = "recording of observation of systemic arterial blood pressure of identified subject" o meta-type = dependent continuant (recording) of dependent occurrent (observation act) o relations = + recording-of 22222222 * concept 22222222 o description = "observation of systemic arterial blood pressure of identified subject" o meta-type = dependent occurrent (observation act) of realist phenomenological instance (?) o relations = + observation-of 33333333 * concept 33333333 o description = "systemic arterial blood pressure of identified subject" o meta-type = realist phenomenological instance (?) o relations = + instance of 44444444 * concept 44444444 o description = "systemic arterial blood pressure" // or however it should be named o meta-type = realist phenomenological category o relations = + is-a 55555555 * concept 55555555 o description = "blood pressure" o meta-type = realist phenomenological category o relationships = + is-a 66666666 * concept 66666666 + etc This is just off the top of my head. I put in some meta-types to try and indicate the qualitative differences between the categories. Clearly, from 44444444 down, we have a normal realist ontology. The 333333333 node could belong in the same ontology, or perhaps be treated as some kind of generated post-coordination of 44444444. The first two nodes it seems to me have to be dealt with in separate dependent ontologies. I am very interested to hear more expert opinions on this. - thomas beale -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20100311/0c337f22/attachment.html>
