Minutes from 08/30/07 Conference Call

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Present on the call: Jim Zheng, Wenle Zhao, Jennifer Fostel, Richard Scheuermann

1. Upcoming CDISC presentation - The OCI abstract was accepted for an oral presentation at the upcoming 2007 CDISC International Interchange on October 1-5 2007 at the Marriott Bethesda North Hotel & Conference Center.

ACTION ITEM: A draft presentation will assembled by Richard and distributed for comments by the OCI Working Group in mid-September.

2. Richard discussed the need for use cases to demonstrate both how the OCI ontology would be used in the clinical research domain and how we would demonstrate that using an ontology versus a flat vocabulary would add value to clinical research representation and analysis. All parties were asked to consider this issue for discussion at the next OCI conference call.

3. Jim presented an overview of his analysis of the OCI term list using his abstract analysis algorithm. This algorithm looks for overrepresentation of specific terms in a subset of selected Pubmed abstracts, in this case the subset of abstracts containing the term "clinical trials". For the most part, terms in the OCI list were overrepresented in these abstracts suggesting that they are indeed specific for the clinical trials domain. The list was further evaluated by Wenle as a subjective assessment of relevance by a domain expert.

ACTION ITEM: Jim will merge these data with the analysis of OBI branch membership for the same terms developed previously by Jennifer. The merged list will be used to establish priority for future OCI term work.

4. The possibility of obtaining external funding to support OCI development work was discussed, including a recent RFA released by the NIH entitled Data Ontologies for Biomedical Research.

ACTION ITEM: Jim was encouraged to explore the details of this funding opportunity further.

Next call scheduled for September 13th.