“These pages deal with the key challenge of designing information model (’IM’) structures – mostly represented in openEHR as archetypes – and terminology to be semantically equivalent. Why are they not just the same? For many reasons: archetypes are about what information is useful to gather; terminologies (of the ontological kind, like SNOMED CT, and weakly, ICDx, ICPCx) are about what facts are true of certain categories of phenomena of interest in the domain. Thus, an archetype can be designed to represent the common post-partum Apgar data and scores at 1 minute and 5 minutes, whereas an ontology would not necessarily choose either the same data points or time points – neverthless the data points in the archetype should relate to (some) concepts (somewhere) in the terminology, and more importantly, should not violate any underlying ontological rules.
Article
Thomas Beale, OpenEHR, 11 November 2009
