Minutes from 05/10/07 Conference Call

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Attendees: Barry, Trish, Simona, Jim, Cristian, Richard, Jamie

Meeting Minutes:

• Use Cases for the CTO - why do we need an ontology rather than simply a structured vocabulary like the CDISC glossary?
  • useful for software to be able to convert hospital documents such that they are compatible with a data standard to facilitate things like submission to FDA, global clinical research, etc
  • to encourage annotation of data and enable reliable retrieval and query
  • to enable software to structure how information is provided in clinical report forms
  • to be able to identify clinical trials based on the attributes they are annotated with (like the Gene Ontology)
  • to facilitate communications between clinical trials investigators and software/equipment vendors in making custom changes to equipment during the course of a clinical trial
  • to standardize terminology across the clinical trial domain

• Evaluation for work done over past week
  • we need to merge term lists, map synonyms, split terms with multiple definitions
  • we need a summary description of each of the term lists on the wiki, and they should be better organized
  • draft placement of terms into various OBI categories is a great start and a great indication of the kind of progress we have made. We need to further evaluate these placements and determine whether there are fundamental changes that need to be made to OBI (such as "object aggregates" of people with the role "population" rather than "population" as a child of "object aggregate"
  • Other examples: a drug should really be a chemical that plays the role of "drug" or "treatment", etc.
  • We should split up main branches and have certain people focus on a single branch in order to avoid overlap in ontology development
  • We should approach both a top-down and a bottom-up approach in development. By taking our initial term lists, we can determine the major CTO branches and begin working on individual branches
  • We should start positioning terms in Protege and adhere to our check-out policy for working on the OWL file
  • We should import OBI into a new CTO OWL file in order to keep OBI/BFO terms uneditable. Any proposed edits to OBI should be done within the OBI itself. Simona will compile our list of question for OBI on term placement. Trish/Jamie will work on generating the CTO OWL file with OBI imported

• CTO Branches (volunteers)
  • Jim - Study design
  • Simona - Roles
  • Richard/Jamie - Protocol

• CTO workshop
  • Presentation at workshop will be focused on our development process and rationale
  • We need to generate graphics of the major CTO branches and how they are integrated into the OBI
  • Deadline for work done on branches in the CTO OWL file is COB on Monday, May 14. Jamie will generate graphs based on this OWL file