in the admin console there's an item called 'Ontology'. It seems to allow you to import lists of concepts, which describe terms, give synonyms, etc. is this used by labkey's free text search? if not, where does it come into play? does this system allow for relationships between concepts that are more advanced than synonyms?
also, at least on my machine, when you hit 'View Types' i get a null pointer exception.
thanks. |
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| Matthew Bellew responded: |
2011-02-24 08:32 |
This code is designed to allow importing an UMLS ontology subset. This feature is not, however, hooked up to the rest of the product. So the link you found is really a test page at the moment.
If the feature were complete, it would allow you to import an ontology and then associate field definition with ontology concepts (heart rate, weight, etc), and perhaps define fields whose values are limited to some set of concepts (medicines). |
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| Ben Bimber responded: |
2011-02-24 08:41 |
got it. so essentially you're saying that if a field is some arbitrary table is defined as the concept 'heart rate', then it would inherit behaviors potentially including allowable values, ranges, display attributes, etc? basically like inheriting a shared property descriptor / field metadata?
does UMLS define any of this more advanced stuff, or does it just define the attributes (ie. datatype and synonyms) that I see in the example on that page?
is this a project that's actively being developed for 11.1? |
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| Matthew Bellew responded: |
2011-02-24 08:59 |
UMLS is huge. It is basically a compendium of other ontologies where the metadata had been unified (the ontology's ontology?). It has snomed, mesh, ncithesaurus, and the kitchen sink. This is nice because it let's me deal with one data format, and let's the user subset the ontologies he wants.
In my investigation, it's sometimes is hard to directly go from a concept, say "medicine" to a set of values, say legal medicine codes. However, I think that is something that could perhaps be layered on top without too much pain.
However, this work is not under active development. |
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| Ben Bimber responded: |
2011-02-24 09:10 |
alright. i'm at least superficially familiar with UMLS. i'm deeply skeptical that things like going from the concept of "medicine" or even 'medications' to a truly useful subset of terms is ever really going to do anything terribly meaningful from such a huge meta-database like that, or even if you start from 'smaller' subsets like SNOMED only. I get the ease of a single format, but if it's not retaining any sort of hierachy or relationship between terms then it seems you're losing a primary point of having such a thing. seems to me that the power of this vocabulary comes when it can be used for intelligent search/filtering - and you need more than just synonyms to do that right. i'm be a little worried you're getting this giant list of terms without any good way to use it.
if it's not being worked on, then this can be picked up at some future time though. |
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