Using OCL to Manage Bahmni Concepts

Software Bahmni
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@ssmusoke asked some questions in MVP for using OCL to manage Bahmni concepts - #3 by ssmusoke that I am going to answer in this thread instead:

  1. I am assuming the collections are by value not by reference - in that the concepts are copied into the collection rather than holding a reference to the base definition, so that when the base concept changes the copy becomes stale. So what is the support to sync and find out-of-date definitions

Collections are by reference, and this reference is to a concept version, so they won’t “drift” after you create them. (It may eventually be allowed to have a collection refer to the head version of a concept, but that’s not a priority for me.)

OCL eventually needs tools to help you see when the concepts your collections refer to have updates, but this is not a foreseeable priority for work that I’m directing.

  1. While the baseline concepts CEIL, SNOMED etc are there, what is the support for namespaced concepts - say for a Hospital XYZ which may conflict with later CEIL/SNOMED concepts? So that custom concepts “do not pollute” the defined and curated lists.

The idea is that OCL is a shared space that everyone (whether they’re a recognized authority or just an implementation) can create concepts in their own namespace, and/or copy concepts from others.

CIEL and SNOMED are only “special” insofar as there’s a web of trust around them that leads people to look at these first. So, given today’s OCL code, when you search for “Diabetes” you’ll find matches from CIEL and from Hospital Xyz with no indication of which you should be looking at.

I guess that OCL will eventually weight its search results to boost concepts/sources with more references. But in the short run this doesn’t matter much since the early adopters are most interested in using CIEL subsets, and not so much in creating their own concepts.

  1. What is the process and support for adding a custom namespaced concept to the curated list? If not yet then still okay

You just create your own user account, or your own organization, and create your concepts. There’s no special process.

  1. How can the collection be downloaded from OCL for application without an online connection - MDS, SQL script?

That’s being worked on in this sprint. It’s going to be a new packaging mechanism (not MDS or SQL, but rather based on the REST representations in OCL.)

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