Hi Grahame,
On 05/01/2015 06:05 PM, Grahame Grieve wrote:
HI David
I cannot let this go by without some comment.
Therefore implementers are required to create their own workarounds
to bridge these standards and overcome the incompatibilities.
However, because implementers use different approaches, data still
lacks interoperability between implementers.
you make it sound as though the standards are the problem, rather than a
symptom of the problem.
Oops. We certainly did not mean to denigrate standards!
Even if all the standards completely agreed,
implementers would still have to do this. And it will be a long time
before we can get consistent standards across the whole stack - some
levels we haven't even started to have discussions about
Agreed. But I also think that RDF can help in the evolution toward
consistent standards.
The ONC should add a recommendation for a universal information
representation that can accurately capture the meaning of any
healthcare information, spanning all ONC-mandated standards,
regardless of the the data formats, data models, or vocabularies
prescribed by those standards.
we've already had one of these, and we know what the outcome is - the
universal representation steadily becomes it's own goal, more important
than the outcomes that are sought.
I think it depends on how it is done. I think a more bottom-up,
collaborative approach can succeed where previous approaches have not.
RDF has some key benefits that help in this regard: being independent of
data format; cleanly accommodating distributed extensibility; and
supporting inference.
Suggestion 2: Recommend RDF as the best available universal
information representation
This completely misses the point; for the kind of disagreement that your
comments seek to address, RDF is just a format that has few semantics
(and the ones it has work as much against the goals as for them). I'm
not against getting common RDF representations for standards
(obviously), but it's just moving the deck chairs around: it won't make
any difference at any level that matters.
I agree that it does not solve the problem in and of itself. There will
still be semantic differences between similar concepts in different
standards, even if the information is all expressed in RDF. But I think
the adoption of a common information representation is an important
first step, because: (a) it allows those differences to be exposed and
more visible in that common representation; and (b) it allows semantic
relationship between those concepts to be expressed in that same common
representation.
David Booth
