2. Summary of benefits

This document is intended to target a lay audience without particular DL or Clinical expertise.    Could draw from Palo Alto document, simplified.  Aiming for 1 or 2 pages of A4.

Palo Alto outcome document:

The principle benefit of including more DL features in SNOMED CT’s expressive power is, therefore, the ability to represent content in a more fully systematised and thus more machine processable way. Doing so will enable much greater systematisation of future and legacy content, which will yield the following benefits:

• increased efficiency, consistency, precision and quality of authoring through reduced manual effort to organise content

• lower costs to author and maintain content through reduced manual effort

• a more complete and consistent product that is, as a consequence, more usable (for implementers and end users) and attractive (to drive adoption and implementation)

• reduction in the cost of assessing the impact of modelling change, because changes also become systematically describable (and transformable).

• simplification of content modelling by removing workarounds

The intended beneficiaries of increasing SNOMED CT’s description logic feature set are 

• authors, who will be able to achieve greater productivity and reach a higher quality at a lower cost

• implementers, who will receive a more consistent (and hence more implementable) product

• end users (e.g. clinicians, researchers), who will use a more complete and consistent product which ultimately provides them with better tools

• IHTSDO and members, who will have a product able to meet its objectives and be more attractive, ultimately aiding adoption and attracting new members

Questions this document should answer:

1.  What problems do we currently have that cannot be met by current logic profile.

2.  What will be able to do with the new logic profile?

   1. Clinically relevant examples.

3. What is the benefit to: Clinicians, Vendors, NRCs,  (others eg epidemiologists)

Current Limitations

Why add more logic?

Fully Defining concepts allows us to use a logic reasoner (classifier) to make inferences; to say which concepts are actually sub-types of other concepts.   This has a wide range of benefits.   With concepts defined with a parent at the top of the sub-hierarchy and a sufficient set of attributes, the classifier can infer the entire structure of the hierarchy, putting each concept in its correct place.   This means that when further changes are made to the hierarchy, reclassifying will adjust the structure automatically as required, saving the need for manual intervention to modify each concept affected.  This automation reduces costs, increases accuracy and improves the precision of the ontology.

However in order to be able to fully define a concept, we must be able to make statements which distinguish each concept.   In the Anatomy sub-hierarchy for example, we need to be able to say that some region in the body is part of another region.  In the Products sub-hierarchy, in order to tell the difference between a 200mg and 500mg tablet of Paracetamol, we need to be able to express the product strength as a number.  The existing restrictions inherent in SNOMED's RF2 Relationship tables do not currently allow us to make these sorts of statements.

Therefore the ability of SNOMED to express statements about concepts must be extended further if we are to be able to take advantage of the benefits of fully defining concepts.