Re: Gehr and CEN

[DavidR5317]

Tim,

  The 2 types of analysis you are referring to are forms of Lexical Semantic
Analysis.  The 2 types are called paradigmatic analysis and syntagmatic
analysis.  Paradigmatic Analysis is focused on breaking language into its
atomic concepts while syntagmatic analysis is focused on the use of concepts
in context (molecules, paying attention to idioms and other forms of speech
where the meaning is not simply the sum of the individual words).  The one
approach is more reductionist and the other more holist.  They both have
their merits and appropriate usage.  In the projects that I have worked on we
have found that the paradigmatic approach seems to be best utilized in
Clinical Data Repositories where the goal is to bring together disparate data
sets from disparate systems and find a way to "normalize" the data.  On the
other hand if you are trying to design a system that is useful to clinicians
and captures the nuances of clinical discourse then the syntagmatic approach
is superior in terms of a user interface vocabulary.  The biggest challenge
we have faced so far is how to link the results of paradigmatic analysis and
syntagmatic analysis in to an integrated health data dictionary.  A good
example is to integrate SNOMED (paradigmatic analysis) with MEDCIN
(syntagmatic analysis).  This has turned out to be a more complex undertaking
than we had expected.  

DaveR