Medical Informatics Europe: August 27-30 2006
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Tutorial on Standards and Ontology Barry
Smith and Werner Ceusters Keywords: Standards, ontology, terminology, ISO,
HL7, SNOMED, OBO, NCI Thesaurus |
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Director, IFOMIS, Curriculum Vitae Barry Smith is Director of the Institute for Formal
Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) in Smith’s research focus is ontology and its
applications in biomedicine and biomedical informatics. He is currently also
working on a variety of projects relating to terminologies and
standardisation. Director, Ontology Research Group, http://org.buffalo.edu/ceusters Curriculum Vitae Werner Ceusters studied medicine (1977-84),
neuropsychiatry (1984-90), informatics (1988-90) and knowledge engineering
(1991-93). He started a series of international research projects in medical
natural language processing under the Third, Fourth and Fifth Research
Frameworks of the European Commission through his R&D company Office Line
Engineering nv. Since then, he has also been active in standardisation bodies
related to medical terminology such as CEN/TC251/WG2 and ISO/TC215/WG3. In
April 1998, he started a new company – Language & Computing nv (L&C)
– to exploit the results of his research. He left L&C in 2004, his main
interest being now applying and testing a new theoretically-grounded approach
to ontological engineering. As of February 2006 he leads the Referent
Tracking Unit of the Ontology Research Group in the New York State Center of
Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. He is also Coordinator of
Bioinformatics in the University at Buffalo Health Science Faculties, and
Professor of Psychiatry in the |
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Abstract As biomedical research, medical care and medical
record-keeping become ever more sophisticated in their use of computers, so
the standardisation of biomedical data and information becomes an ever more
pressing need. Standardisation can not only help to reduce costs and promote
safety in medical care, it can also provide the basis for new types of
virtual biomedical research by enabling uniform data to be used for purposes
of scientific reasoning in ways which transcend the confines of single
institutions. To this end, however, standards must be developed which ensure
not merely syntactic regimentation but also what is often called ‘semantic
interoperability’. Standards and ontologies are two
distinct kinds of socio-cognitive artefacts which serve the needs of
syntactic and semantic regimentation in different ways. They also confront
similar difficulties in development and application, difficulties which are
not only theoretical and technical, but also sociological. Standards and
ontologies, if they are to be effective, must be widely used, and this means that
they must be documented in ways which are clear and understandable to the
relevant target audiences. Yet theoretical reflection on standards, on the
conditions which must be satisfied by good standards, and on the relations
between standards and ontologies, are still almost unknown. The present tutorial is designed
to fill this gap. It will serve as an introduction to the much-needed
theoretical reflection on standards and ontologies as applied in the domains
of health care and biomedical research. We shall examinin
the work of three representative organisations influential in the realm of
standardisation and ontology development in the domain of the life sciences:
Health Level 7 Inc., the |
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Suggested Background Barry Smith, Werner Ceusters and Rita Temmerman, Wüsteria, MIE 2005
(Studies in Health and Technology Informatics, 116), 647–652. Gunnar O. Klein and Barry Smith, Concept
Systems and ontologies: Recommendations based on discussions between realist
philosophers and ISO/CEN experts concerning the standards addressing
“concepts” and related terms. Ceusters W, Smith B. Strategies for
Referent Tracking in Electronic Health Records. Journal of Biomedical
Informatics. In press. |
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Agenda 1. Standards
and Ontology: An Introduction (BS and WC)
2. HL7
(BS)
a. Problems with HL7 V2
b. The Vision of HL7 V3
c. The RIM and Its Problems
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Participation Attendees who might find this tutorial worthwhile
include: developers and users of standards, developers and users of
electronic health record systems, physicians and others interested in the
possibilities of modern healthcare informatics systems and in the role of
ontologies in biomedicine. All participants will receive from their attendance
in the tutorial familiarity with a variety of approaches to healthcare
standardisation and a thorough overview of problems in existing standards and
of prospects for improvement in the future. This tutorial does not require
any prior detailed knowledge of standards and of the processes through which
they are established, modified and applied, though some familiarity with
these topics will make it easier to understand the deeper issues involved.
Basic familiarity with medical informatics is required. |