Hey Chime,
Thanks for coming up with this project task proposal relating to
conversion of legacy terminologies to OWL/RDF, it's very exciting.
I really like your idea of picking a specific subdomain, like drug
terminology, and using that to test out the pitfalls/possibilities.
(Actually, I think very domain-specific ontolgies have, as a rule, the
strongest likelihood of short-term practical utility.)
We (Mary and I) have an ongoing project involving cancer reporting for
public health where I've always dreamed of producing an OWL/RDF
adaptation of content culled from a variety of sources including
SNOMED CT, and also others. Unlike the NIH cancer ontology which
includes a lot of biosicence related content, we'd focus exclusively
on supporting routine clinical aspects of cancer care.
I'd love to make this a use case. It does involve modeling some
"utility" classes and relations (like Patient, Physician, etc.) but
I'd like to move that stuff out into some more generic project.
(As Vipul knows, modeling that stuff always involves taking
appropriate cognizance of constitutencies at HL7, CDISC, CaBIG, etc.
etc. -- although I think it would be grand just to demonstrate to the
world that it is possible to do this without stepping on anyone's toes
through the judicious use of imports, sameAs/ differentFrom,
equivalentClass, seeAlso, etc).
John
P.S. w.r.t SNOMED CT, to just clarify the point I in the call today
about whether there would ever be an OWL-SNOMED: the expressivity of
the DL underlying SNOMED is roughly on a par with that of RDFS. It is
far less expressive than OWL. I could therefore imagine an RDF-SNOMED,
but not an OWL-SNOMED.
Anyway, unlike RDF/S, SNOMED has never had a published formal
semantics, and certainly not a model-theoretic one like RDF/OWL's.
(Indeed, the absence of an explicit model-theoretic semantics makes
the claim that SNOMED is DL-based at all pretty fuzzy-wuzzy. I'd
maintain this is so even though, in practice, each SNOMED CT release
has to classify on the ontylog reasoner.) Hence my remark earlier that
it might be safest just to consider SNOMED concepts, if represented as
resources, as being instances of skos:Concept.
- Clinical terminologies to OWL John Madden
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