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Re: IHTSDO meeting - term binding presentation available


Hi Sebastian, 

If I can give my own perspective on this, having been peripherally 
involved for some time..

1. Unfortunately, the IHTSDO (www.ihtsdo.org), who is responsible for 
the ongoing management and development of SNOMED CT, is still a 
somewhat closed and traditional standards development organisation. It 
has no publicly accessible wiki of resources à la openEHR. It does, 
however, have a substantial community of individuals from member 
countries and affiliate organisations and several collaborative 
websites and mailing lists where ideas, contributions, new 
specifications etc. are documented and evolve. I would guess that the 
majority of participants are either active in other standards 
development organisations, or staff/affiliates of member nation health 
informatics programs such as the UK's NHS Connecting for Health 
Program, Canada's Infoway, Australia's National E-Health Transition 
Authority, etc.

2. For many years prior to IHTSDO taking over SNOMED CT from the 
College of American Pathologists, SNOMED CT embraced a mechanism and 
format for producing "subsets" of SNOMED CT. About 18 months ago, 
proposals for a new  SNOMED release format and a new Reference Set 
format (to replace the old subset mechanism) emerged and evolved. These 
two proposals morphed into a single umbrella specification called 
Release Format 2, which has now reached Draft for Trial Use status 
within the IHTSDO. One of the specification documents covers Reference 
Set formats and is available in part 2 of RF2 at: 
http://www.ihtsdo.org/publications/draft-for-review-and-trial-use/ .  
This draft specification includes support for "language refsets", which 
may be of particular interest to you. Access to the collaborative space 
where these documents are made available is described at: 
http://www.ihtsdo.org/about-ihtsdo/collaborative-space/ .

3. To my knowledge there is no formal IHTSDO proposal for a query 
language to express Refset membership specifications. However, the 
IHTSDO Terminology Workbench does incorporate quite a sophisticated 
mechanism for building refsets using an underlying ( and evolving) 
query-based expression language. Note: these refsets do not necessarily 
need to be specific to SNOMED. The refset specifications, however, are 
currently designed to  construct  static files for distribution 
alongside the SNOMED core and national extension files, rather than for 
producing dynamically evaluated termsets for  local needs, as might be 
supported for openEHR templates, say.

eric
----

On 2010-05-06, at 5:48 PM, Sebastian Garde wrote:

> Hi Thomas,
> 
> do you know if there is a formal way of how RefSets (=the resulting 
> Snomed CT codes etc.) and the RefSet query (=the query on Snomed CT 
> to get to the RefSet) are expressed and shared?
> Similar to what is described here but based on RefSets: 
> http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/term/Ocean+Terminology+Query+Language+%28TQL%29
>  
> 
> I agree that RefSets are a good way forward, but they need to be 
> available, reusable and sharable, etc.
> 
> Sebastian
> 
> Thomas Beale wrote:
>> 
>> I attended the IHTSDO meeting just finished in Copenhagen. Things 
>> look pretty good for where SNOMED CT is going generally - the RF2 
>> technical infrastructure seems relatively well designed. There is a 
>> lot of activity in content modeling, the IHTSDO workbench and many 
>> other areas relevant to openEHR. Converely, I believe openEHR will 
>> be very important to make SNOMED CT work in many places, since it 
>> will be via archetypes, templates and associated ref sets that 
>> information systems will be able to connect to terminology in a 
>> disciplined way. I believe that ref sets are the future of SNOMED CT 
>> (and any terminology for that matter) in use in real systems.
>> 
>> I was asked to present a view from openEHR about 'terminology 
>> binding', i.e. connecting terminology and information models. My 
>> presentation is on this page 
>> http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/term/Terminology+Binding 
>> or see the following direct links:
>>      • PDF - 
>> http://www.openehr.org/wiki/download/attachments/5997267/openEHR_term_binding_IHTSDO_april_2010.pdf
>>      • PPTX - 
>> http://www.openehr.org/wiki/download/attachments/5997267/openEHR_term_binding_IHTSDO_april_2010.pptx
>> I hope this is useful.  I will continue to document IHTSDO-related 
>> thoughts on the openEHR wiki, and I encourage others to do the same.
>> 
>> - thomas beale
>> 
>> 
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>> 
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>>   
>> 
> 
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