Safe querying of a RIM-based data model

Summary

• How would "safe querying of a RIM-based data model" work? If one pulls an Act (e.g. observation) from the database which is at the core of the response, what other acts should one include in the response in order for the Act to be accurately securely semantically interpreted?

Related issue: Object nets and object trees. If one queries for 'relevant data' and the source is an object net, then how does one determine where to 'snip' the links? If one doesn't snip any links then the entire net will have to be returned.

Analysis

• Bob Dolin: Related acts, context propagation, post-coordinated expressions, negationInd, etc - if not considered in a query, can all result in misrepresented data. I suspect some folks have a false sense of security when using templates, that by understanding the templateId they can safely process the data, even though there may be act relationships, etc.
• Bob Dolin: It makes me nervous when you (Grahame) state that you don't believe it should be the case that you need to understand all the components to safely interpret an act. Consider for instance that in CCD, we represent problem status (which includes values such as "ruled out") as a related act. Under what circumstances would you be comfortable basing decisions on an Act without looking at the (transitive) relationships?
• Grahame: I don't think you can safely ignore related acts. Though we could probably define some limitations to the impact they might make on the meaning of the code.
• Charlie McCay: It has never been robustly stated that you must process and understand all component acts to safely use act.code (indeed I do not believe that that is or should be the case) -- whereas it is clear that Snomed expressions can contain context modifying attributes (such as certainty and family history) - so if you can process an expression well enough to find the concept, you should know that just finding the concept is not enough. So not syntactic sugar - just clear processing rules for snomed expressions.
• Andy Harris: it depends on the context!, so basically all acts should be made available
• 2010-01-19 Peter Hendler: I just met with Bob who said he noted that the way most vendors are querying RIM structures at HIMSS is error prone and dangerous. It has to do with the fact that they do not take into consideration negation indicators or context conduction. He said our group (RIMBAA) is in his opinion one of the key groups now, and we would be the best ones to address this issue. He would like us to create a white paper about the correct ways to query RIM structures. Not down to the sql or hpath level as much as a white paper to show what can go wrong and how to avoid the pitfalls. He wanted to come to our meeting but isn't free for Q2 tomorrow. Brazil isn't a good idea because not many of us will be there, but next meeting in Boston he'd like to be on our schedule.
• 2010-01-19 Grahame: As mentioned in Q1 MnM this morning, I volunteered to do this in the past. I agree that we need to progress this.