Concrete Domains RF2 Impact Analysis

The SNOMED International Release Manager @Andrew Atkinson raised the following questions on behalf of the Terminology Release Advisory Group:

1. Roughly how many relationships using the original attribute types will be inactivated in the inferred relationship file?

2. Again, how many of the OWL Axioms are likely to change in the OWLExpression file?

3. What’s the proposed estimated number of records in the new Concrete Rel file?

4. Understand why we’re choosing true/false instead of 1/0 for booleans, but this does contradict the current usage in most RF2 files - is the likelihood of clashing with an actual 1 or 0 high enough to warrant this (soft) break from the standard?

These questions will be answered here in turn.

Relationship Inactivations (working from the 20200731 International Release)

The following attribute types used in the International Drug Model will be inactivated (as well as 2 additional counts proposed for use by National Drug models in italics):

These are simple concepts so the inactivation of the attribute types themselves will result in 9 relationship inactivations of the IS As to the parent concept.

The concepts that use these attribute types will contribute 28,218 inactivations (query).

OWL Axiom Changes

Medicinal products do not use additional axioms containing numbers (they do use them for product roles, but these aren't counted above), so we can say that - as far as numerics are concerned - they have all been modelled using one axiom per concept.  By querying the number of unique source concepts that are affected in the relationship inactivations, we obtain the number of axioms in the stated view that will need to change.   Answer: 13,515 (query)

I'll cross check that with ECL, which also gives 13.515 (although interesting to note the answer rises to 13,561 in the daily build (at date of writing 29 June2020), so that gives an indication of where we're going to be at by the time of the January 2021 International Release).    In fact since all clinical drugs will also have a count of of base of active ingredient, I could have gotten away with just checking for the presence of 766952006 |Count of base of active ingredient (attribute)| which gives the same count.

New Concrete Values Relationship File

Every relationship inactivated in the move to using concrete domains will be replaced by an equivalent one, so the number of new rows in the new concrete values relationship file will also be of the order of 28,218 (Running against the daily build today 29 June 2020, the number suggested would be 28,335 so given the time-frame involved it seems unlikely that we'd breach 30K) 

Boolean Values - Choice of true/false  vs 0/1 as currently used eg by the active field

Well the type of the concrete value (String, Number, Boolean) will not be obvious from the file itself.   The MRCM will be needed to be sure what type is being used.   So whether you're looking at an ingredient count of 1 or a "true" value would not be obvious.   Having true and false as values are less ambiguous in this regard, although you could still be looking at a String.

I will ask the MAG to revisit their thinking on this question, given your point @Andrew Atkinsonabout us having set a precedent with the active field.   The question is academic to an extent because we do not currently use any boolean values in the International Drug Model and have no plans to do so.   This is more likely to affect Singapore who definitely use them, or perhaps Australia.