On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, Kashyap, Vipul wrote:
An important issue that is likely to come up soon in healthcare is the integration of a person's genetic information in the electronic medical record. So, would it make sense to extend the person class to hold a person's genomic information?
Absolutely. However, concensus on a placeholder class for a person doesn't prevent you from extending it with other attributes (or relationships with other classes) at a latter point - that's one of the advantages of the expressiveness of Description Logics.
Seems to me the biggest barrier is in coming to a concensus on an appropriate placeholder vocabulary and not neccessarily on determining all the various ways in which a person (and their related data) could be expressed in a patient record.
Another big issue is one of privacy. How does one specify ACLs related to what fields of the person class be visible to which classes of users? Maybe we need another ontology there?
I'm glad you brought this up. I've been of the opinion for some time that issues of security policy (from the perpective of content management systems at least) are often overlooked within Semantic Web technologies and that Access Control Lists are a very appropriate model to follow. The structure is very simple, and it is a time-tested infrastructure for delegating identification-driven access to resources.
A follow-up question I have about this is if we imagine (for HCLS purposes) access control being specified down to the level of triples *within* a graph (assuming a partitioning scenario where each patient record constitutes a named graph) or if ACL would only manage access at the record level.
The distinction is important as the content management system we use controls access to the record (or graph) level allowing content ontologies to remain ACL-agnostic - and delegating access control as a mechanism of the content management system.
If a finer level of granularity is needed, it does suggests the need for a general-purpose ontology for ACL.
---Vipul
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]
