2016-09-19 - OBSERVABLE Meeting

I am not skilled enough to give a good answer to the questions raised during last meeting by the slides of David Sperzel.

Nevertheless I understand the proposal

• as going in one of direction SNOMED probably has to go : make a link or rework SNOMED so that the ontology reuses the standard top level ontologies.

• As a response to several remarks made by Barry Smith.

I would like to suggest that the group ask input to Stefan Schulz. He is likely to be one of the best skilled member in the domain.

May be we could also ask for some external advice to Barry Smith too. Of course this may create discussion / comparison with OGMS.

But having input / help form those 2 leaders will certainly be very valuable.

The top level ontologies were discussed when the model was developed, and were used to influence the model, and there is an BioTop-to-Observables bridge developed in cooperation with Stefan Schulz.

OGMS does not (signifcantly) overlap with the Observables model (and possibly presence is an area where the relationship is particularly unclear). I've talked to Barry (a tiny bit) about an ontology of health care observation and he realized the lack of any such work in the OBO community, e.g. the Ontology of Biomedical Inverstigation is geared towards research observations (I've discussed this non-overlap with Bjorn Peters). Also, Jim Campbell presented the Nebraska work using the Observables model at the ICBO meeting this week and directed Barry towards the Observables project. Stefan Schulz used to be active in the project but has not participated the last year, but I'm sure he would help if asked. So chances are we will get feedback from both in the near future.

Thanks,
Daniel 

I completely agree that it would be very useful to get as much input from Stefan Schulz and Barry Smith as they are willing to provide. Much of the information in my slides is based on publications from these two authors, but it's certainly possible that I got some things wrong. Whatever SNOMED CT ends up doing about representing observation results in the long run, I think we want to be sure that neither of these two experts considers it to be incorrect from a formal ontological standpoint.