Ontology services

DRAFT - this article is in a very draft state and must not be relied upon as being up to date or an actual reflection of the world's true state.

The Information model service is a set of services that enables the Discovery common information model to be created, updated, distributed and accessed.

The service includes a set of web applications and a set of APIs to aninformation model server and an information_model_distribution_service

All components of the service are open source and available at the Discovery Endeavour githubs https://github.com/endeavourhealth and https://github.com/endeavourhealth-discovery

The information model server provides a set of APIs that help systems and users access the content of the Discovery common information model.

The information model itself is internally defined via the Discovery_information_model_language which is a group of standards based languages with some pragmatic additions that enable the service to operate.  Externally, the Information model can be accessed via standards based APIs or by Discovery language based APIs that are supported by the Information model server.

The following lists the functional groupings of the IM Service. Some of these use web applications , some use the information model server, and some use the information model distribution service components that maintain locally owned copies of the information model.

Support for Value sets

The service supports the creation of, maintenance of, distribution of, and access to value set definitions and value sets.

A value set definition is a collection of concept expressions that have been brought together for particular business purposes. They are different from standard concept definitions because the meaning of some members of a value set may not be subsumed by the implied meaning of the value set. Value set definitions are desribed in more detail in the Discovery_Information_model_language.

Value set editor

The value set editor enables people to create and maintain value set definitions which can then be downloaded, accessed via an API or distributed via the information model distribution service. 

Value set run time generator 

The value set generator returns a list of concepts that are defined by a value set definition for use in queries, thus supporting advanced subsumption_testing against health care records.

The value set generator API accepts the IRI of a value set either in full, or relative to a baseline IRI e.g. http://DiscoveryDataService/InformationModel#VSET_Covid1 and returns a list of concepts to be used in the query. The API supports both core concepts and original codes that have been mapped to the core concepts.

Value set distributor

The value set distributor maintains tables of value sets for databases that use local instances of the Discovery information model. 

This is part of the information_model_distribution_service that runs on an application server,  and is designed to detect changes to the content of the information model and regenerate the value sets from the value set definitions. The value sets are regenerated whenever a value set definition changes or whenever there is an update to the concepts within the information model.