Modeling the real-world has always been a challenge to any health informatics professional. The fact is that the way humans perceive their world is vastly beyond the capabilities of technology to document. In essence, the best way to model the world is to live in it and be part of it.
But for lesser mortals, who are given the responsibility to use modeling tools to create software, there is hope. The Protégé Ontology Editor and Knowledge Acquisition System
at Stanford University aims to assist modelers organize and manage entities and their relationships. The relationships are conceptual (as opposed to the programmatic relationships in databases).
So how do we use Protege? There is the left-to-right approach and (of course!) the right-to-left. The right-to-left means there is an existing form already being used and the data elements from that form are extracted to form the concepts (facets) in the ontology. The left-to-right requires the modeler to think of concepts, to place them on the ontology and then later, on the form. L-R is more difficult but it could be a more comprehensive and coherent way of constructing the ontology.
If you’re working on some ontologies, let us know!
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