Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management 149
tions as viewing a patient’s record from different perspectives (e.g., clinical audit,
producing reports, meeting central returns, research, etc.). The CTV3 classifies
chemicals by their name, i.e., alphabetically. The first version of Read Codes
(CTV1) was initially developed to provide a terminology for describing relevant
clinical summaries and administrative data for general practice. It is known as the
4-Byte Set since each code is four characters long. In the next version (CTV2), the
codes were subsequently adapted for use in hospitals, and were extended to allow
more detail. To hold more detailed information, a supplementary alphanumeric
character was included in the Read Codes (5-Byte Sets) (NHS Information Authority
2000.b). CTV2 uses the code to specify a class and its unique place within
the taxonomy, which has a limited, fixed number of levels. The CTV3, with its
flexible structure unlike the previous versions, allows more changes in terminology
(Jurisica et al., 2004). The Read Codes have been changed in each version
(based on strict protocol under central control of NHS) by adding terms and codes
to fix the errors and reflect the newly discovered knowledge (mostly to enrich the
descriptions). Further alterations include changes to qualifiers and atoms (semantic
definitions), the hierarchical structure and the mapping files (NHS Information
Authority 2000.a). CTV1 and CTV2 changed relatively little between releases,
due to their rigid file structure that was limited to five levels of offspring, and
about 60 siblings. The CTV3 “Description Change File” (DCF) (NHS Information
Authority 2000.a) shares the entire change management procedure between “terminology
providers” and “terminology users” (i.e., clinicians). The DCF starts by
recommending a new code for any terminology discovered to be incorrectly classified
and suggesting that the user replace it. The process continues by labeling the
obsolete concepts as “extinct”. An example from (NHS Information Authority
2000.a) describes the deletion of the relation between the terms 'Cardiac rupture’
and ‘Myocardial infarct’, which turned out to have the same code in CTV2, and
the addition of a new code to ‘Cardiac rupture’ in CTV3.
We also consider some other popular controlled vocabularies in life science
including:
Health Level 7 (HL7): HL7 (http://www.hl7.org/) is an ontology that aims to
provide a UML-based standard for the exchange, management, and integration of
data to support clinical patient care and the management, delivery, and evaluation
of healthcare services.
The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA): FMA (http://sig.biostr.washington.
edu/projects/fm/AboutFM.html) represents a coherent body of explicit declarative
knowledge about human anatomy and claims to be the most complete ontology of
canonical human anatomy in a high granularity from the macromolecular to the
macroscopic levels (Rosse and Mejino 2003).
Terminologia Anatomica (TA): Terminologia Anatomica (Whitmore 1999) is a
standard controlled vocabulary on human anatomical terminology, developed by
the Federative Committee on Anatomical Terminology (FCAT).