Hi, The (short) answer I can make is of the kind : as an ontology user, what can you expect from Archetypes ?
First, you have to understand that you cannot use an ontologie by itself : in the same way that you can't make yourself understood with words only (but need to make sentences), you have to store your ontological terms in a structured way to be able to describe something. Hence, your "ontology based description system" has at least 2 components : the ontology (words with semantic) and the description structure (sentences). To give an example, in the Odyssee project, the structure is a graph (trees + links between nodes). But - at first - why do we use an ontology ? We use an ontology because we want to be able to describe in the same way the various medical documents (reports, examinations datas, prescription, biological results...) and, for example, we want to be able to store an endoscopic report and an echographic report in the same way. So the main advantage of the couple "ontology + structure" is to give you the opportunity of storing and computing documents with very different structures. In the same way you can express very various concepts with natural langage. But how can you assert that a sentence is "well formed" ? It is precisely the answer we expect from Archetypes. So, an "ontology based description system" has at least 3 components : the ontology, the description structure, and an interface to allow the elaboration of well formed descriptions. Philippe AMELINE Odyssee project www.nautilus-info.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Adrian Midgley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Open Health List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, June 22, 2002 8:41 PM Subject: Archetypes and ontologies? I may be showing my confusion and ignorance here, but to what extent do the ideas of GEHR archetypes overlap with the ideas of an ontology as typified by other projects that label themselves ontologies? -- >From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/
