I thought the HCLSIG would be interested in this exchange about scenarios
for using GRDDL for clinical research data - along the lines of previous
threads on using XML and RDF in unison.
Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:38:15 -0500
From: Dan Connolly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Chimezie Ogbuji <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: public-grddl-wg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: GRDDL for clinical research data?
On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 15:12 -0400, Chimezie Ogbuji wrote:
On Thu, 17 Aug 2006, Dan Connolly wrote:
Chime,
You mentioned clinical research data in our 1st meeting.
I suspect that's an interesting XML Schema (or plain XML?) use case.
Do you have any details you can share?
Yes, absolutely. Actually this is the primary motivation for joining the
GRDDL WG. We have been developing a clinical research data management
system which uses XML as the 'main' representation format (organized
around a patient record), edits the XML remotely (on a variety of devices)
via XForms, submits the XML document (via HTTP PUT to a unique URI for
each such record) to a server which (as part of the content management
services) transforms the XML to an RDF equivalent graph for persistence.
Ofcouse, the expense of dual representation is space, but the primary
value is being able to query both as XML and as RDF (the latter being
more amenable for investigative question that rely on alot more
interpretation than a structured format such as XML will provide).
A GRDDL approach could eleviate this expense by allowing a patient record (or
any XML-based
collection of clinical research data) to be queried semantically (via
SPARQL) 'on demand' by associating a GRDDL profile to the specific patient
record XML vocabulary.
A figure of this "before GRDDL" and "with GRDDL" ways of working
would be particularly nice.
Imagine a fellow assigned to determine a search criteria to identify a
patient population for a particular study. He might have a set of
classifications specific to the study he could express as logical rules
(N3 rules). Then, he could write a client (that understood
GRDDL) that speculatively picked a few patient records at random from a
remote server (as XML documents) each of which would be associated (by GRDDL
profile) to a transform to extract the clinical data as RDF (expressed in
a universally supported vocabulary for CPR - such as the HL7 OWL ontology
that Helen Chen from Agfa has been working on) and ask his
speculative questions of the resulting RDF graph.
Or (to take the scenario a step further), apply the study specific rules
on the resulting RDF to classify the patient data according to his domain
of interest (specific diagnoses, pathological observations, etc..)
Bingo. That use case
(1) is likely to be of interest to the healthcare/lifesci audience
and
(2) motivates the use of GRDDL with XML vocabularies
Fabien, Danny, care to roll it in?
I'm tempted to do it myself... but I took an action to set up access
for Fabien. I think WebDAV might work out better for all concerned
than direct CVS/ssh access.
Let's see...
from the WG homepage http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/grddl-wg/
to the Art of Consensus Guide
to the WebDAV docs http://www.w3.org/Guide/Jigedit/Webdav
Ah... I reached danny in #swig...
http://chatlogs.planetrdf.com/swig/2006-08-17#T19-34-22
--
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541 0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E
