April 7, 2005

April 7, 2005 Teleconference

Time: 3:30 to 4:30 PM Eastern Time Convert
Phone #: (877)407-0183
PassCode: 743824#

Attendees:

• Jim Kadin Jackson Labs
• David Aronow Ardais Corporation
• Harold Solbrig Mayo Clinic
• Brian Davis Booze Allen Hamilton
• Kim Klingler SAIC

Discussion

Harold discussed an e-mail about the the value of "other" in the Sex&Gender proposal.

The issue of how caBIG intended to deal with multiple representational forms was raised. Would there be a single "preferred" internal form, with mappings defined to and from other external forms? If so, how should the translations be handled between differing levels of granularity and specificity?

David suggested that this problem may be at least partially reconciled if caBIG adopts the "80-20" rule and doesn't try to capture everything at the finest level of granularity. Using the example of the shoe color, if caBIG handled "green shoes" and didn't try to capture nuances such as "pale lime green", "bright green", etc. HRS - hasn't the Sex&Gender recommendation already brought this to the doorstep by proposing to define compositional gender information - "Male as reported by the patient", "Female as determined by Karotype", etc?

Harold suggested that, by representing null information as metadata, we had already brought translational issues to our doorstep, but perhaps they could be restricted to this general area.

Kim indicated that, while she agreed with the proposal, she would need to talk to some internal folks to understand the ramifications regarding the existing implementations.

David reiterated his previous objection to the use of the word "NULL" in that it changed the scope of the group to presence/absence instead of valid values such as "Unremarkable". He propopse