Identifying complex knowledge artefacts

24/04/2013

Based on a lot of experience, thinking and gnashing of teeth of colleagues Ian McNicoll, Heather Leslie, Sebastian Garde who work on the Ocean Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM) product, as well as many others using archetypes and archetype tools more generally, I have produced a major update to the openEHR Knowledge Artefact Identification specification draft, here.

Lifecycle management with semver.org versioning.

This specification is designed to answer the following needs for complex, designed artefacts like archetypes, templates and terminology subsets:

  • ‘ontological’ (human readable) archetype, template and subset identifiers
  • machine identifiers
  • references to identified artefacts from other artefacts
  • recording knowledge artefact ids in data
  • lifecycle management and states;
  • dealing with transfer and forking;
  • supporting integrity and non-repudiation.

It combines the concept of lifecycle management for knowledge artefacts with a solid versioning model, mostly lifted from the excellent specification at semver.org.

I have taken a lot of care to ensure this specification works equally well with artefacts produced by other organisations, particular non-openEHR archetypes and similar models. It now needs community input and feedback… i.e. feel free to pull it to pieces.


Gun control: a debate in need of framing

22/12/2012

Is the aftermath of the most recent gun massacre in the US any different from those before? Many hope so due to the fact that the dead were mostly little kids of the ages of 5-7; it seems such an unacceptable atrocity that even the gun lobby would realise the need for change. Right? I doubt it. But it doesn’t mean no progress can be made. [this post updated with DailyBeast poll link under opinions 23/12/2012].

Newtown flag of honour

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DCMs & archetypes – why we need 3 layers

09/10/2012

This post is inspired by a slightly out-of-control discussion among people in the CIMI group. It’s a good discussion. The latest question that has come up is whether a DCM (Detailed Clinical Model) is a ‘model of use’ (i.e. some kind of data set) or a ‘model of meaning’ (i.e. some kind of ontological definition).

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US election… is there any point?

07/10/2012

No it’s not Obama and Mitt. You know them. This is Ron Paul talking to Bill Maher, which for me symbolises better what this election is about. Well, it’s about various things. I’ll get back to these two in a minute. Read the rest of this entry »


Models from Intermountain Health – pioneering lessons

22/09/2012

I am back this week from a week in Salt Lake City, visiting Dr Stan Huff’s group at Intermountain Health, a globally recognised centre of excellence for clinical computing. I should have been 10 years ago, but better late than never. Stan has quietly been pioneering model-based health computing for nearly 20 years, featuring Clinical Element Models (CEMs) and terminology.

Intermountain / Caradigm CEM browser

It started with the ASN.1 models used in the (still deployed) 3M system, and progressed through the CEML form (a light-weight XML format developed by Joey Coyle, who just submitted a PhD thesis on the topic) to the current CDL format. CDL stands for Constraint Definition Language, and was co-developed by GE and Intermountain for the Qualibria product. Read the rest of this entry »


Ontologies in health: ready for prime time? IAO versus openEHR

03/09/2012

A lot of ontology work has been going on for some years that comes loosely under the BFO and OBO activities, which stand to improve how computing in health is done. BFO is the Basic Formal Ontology, and OBO is the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies. Work from these efforts is currently being used to better structure the upper level of SNOMED CT, in cooperation with the IHTSDO, its owning organisation.

This week I had the opportunity to read a new paper by André Q Andrade, Maurício B Almeida and Stefan Schulz, entitled “Revisiting ontological foundations of the OpenEHR Entry Model” (PDF). This paper seeks to analyse the openEHR ‘clinical investigator ontology’ which Dr Sam Heard and I published in a MedInfo 2007 paper, using the Information Artefact Ontology (IAO) as the reference. Read the rest of this entry »


The power of the openEHR archetype formalism – visualised

28/06/2012

I made a new beta release of the ADL Workbench today, a tool whose core is a parser and 3-pass validator for archetypes written in the openEHR Archetype Definition Language. Today’s release includes visualisation that really shows how archetypes form a layer above standard information models. The basic idea of archetypes, for those who don’t know, is to be able to configure particular structures of reference model instances to represent specific domain content. For example, the following shows the Indirect Oximetry archetype. The tree column shows the information model (or as we call it in e-health more often, ‘reference model’) classes and properties in blue. So an Indirect Oximetry is a structure made from OBSERVATION, HISTORY, POINT_EVENT, etc and a bunch of ELEMENTs, each having specific meanings in the context of the oximetry Observation.

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