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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: SemWeb again
 4/25/2002 10:49:12 AM, "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@a...> wrote: > >An "RDF version of a well-accepted controlled vocabulary (e.g. SNOMED in the >medical field)" is pretty much exactly what the WebOnt language is going to >provide. SNOMED is based on "description logic", and DAML+OIL is essentially >a DL language. OK, now we're getting somewhere! I looked over the (uh, 3) hits that Google has for ?q=snomed+webont? and found your very interesting presentation at http://www.openhealth.org/talks/XMLBioInformatics.ppt The details are a bit challenging to follow from just the PPT, especially for a non-medical person. Nevertheless, I see that you want to answer queries such as "?Of all the patient?s I operated on for brain tumors between 1996-2000, matching severity of pathology and matching clinical status and who have the ?P53? mutation, did PCV chemotherapy improve the cure rate at five years?? As best I understand it, this would be extremely tedious/challenging to address with SQL or XPath, because the clinical data don't specify "tumors that have the P53 mutation", they describe things like ?glioblastoma.? One then needs to use SNOMED to infer that a glioblastoma is a type of astrocytoma (I?m guessing a lot here; forgive me if I?ve gotten the details wrong, but it?s a GREAT use case!), and then some other knowledge base to add the bit of information that astrocytomas are characterized by the P53 mutation. So, I agree: this is not pie in the sky stuff, this is taking ?real? medical knowledge, encoding it using XML and/or SemWeb technologies, and performing queries/inferences to answer imporant questions. A few questions: How close is anyone to actually building a system that contains enough of SNOMED and the various other bits of knowledge so as to be truly useful to a clinician? Help me understand the value that RDF and DAML+OIL add to the ?raw? SNOMED data. This sounds like a very interesting challenge for RDBMS experts; I would guess that it is too hard for a practical RDBMS-based application, but not being an expert, I would not want to assume that. Has this class of problems been studied, and no practical solution using relatively well-understood technologies been found? I?m reminded of Jonathan Robie?s recent ?Syntactic Web? presentations that argue that if RDF data were serialized in some canonical way, XQuery could be used to address questions that would require specialized tools to evaluate elaborate chains of inference in the RDF paradigm. As a person who is more comfortable with databases than AI-esque systems, this just ?smells? like a complex query (granted, that existing tools may not handle very well) rather than something that requires a whole new paradigm. Can you imagine this being handled with XQuery? Can any XPath2/XQuery experts offer an opinion as to whether this kind of query (sortof a recursive join across three XML collections???) is within their requirements or use cases? Anyway, I would take back all the skeptical, making fun of the SemWeb things I?ve ever said if I saw a compelling demonstration of this kind of problem being solved with real data! 
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