Dear all,
I have hardly participated in any of the calls lately and am coming at
this as a bit of an outsider. From my reading it indeed seems that any
officially accepted RDF version of FHIR data would use a code + code
system representation of 'concepts' from controlled vocabularies /
ontologies. In this case, however, I doubt that the added benefit of
having an RDF version is rather minimal and does not outweigh the added
complexity of an additional representation besides XML and JSON.
The potential benefit of FHIR over other existing approaches (such as
some previous HL7 standards) is simplicity and accessibility through
standard tooling.
The potential benefits of an RDF/OWL representation of health data are
bridging the data model-terminology gap, an intuitive representation of
medical information and easy querying and interlinking of the resulting
data via intuitive SPARQL queries.
I hope I'm wrong, but my impression is that a simple, mostly syntactic
mapping of FHIR in RDF might end up having neither of these qualities,
combining the worst rather than the best of both worlds. A more
sophisticated mapping, on the other hand, might not allow round-tripping
the data and would probably not be accepted as part of the official FHIR
project.
Am I overly sceptical here?
With kind regards,
Matthias Samwald
Am 21.12.2014 00:15, schrieb Lloyd McKenzie:
Well, for FHIR at a minimum, you must be able to round-trip
instances. And what will appear in the JSON and XML instances is the
code + code system (and often multiple code-code system pairs).
Often, the code + code system won't even link to an ontology that's
known by the receiver. And if we want to be able to convert v2 or v3
instances, what appears over the wire there is the code + code system
too. All knowledge of what the binding is for an element is carried
outside the instance.
--------------------------------------
Lloyd McKenzie
+1-780-993-9501
--
Assistant Professor
Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics, and Intelligent Systems
Medical University of Vienna
http://samwald.info/
