LexEVS and CTS2 Meeting Minutes - 2016.09.30

Attendees

Goals

LexEVS and CTS2 are planned to continue as key components of NCI terminology services, but NCI also plans to extend beyond them, notably with RDF triple store SPARQL and REST components. This raises important design and coordination issues.
REST services need substantial extensions, within and beyond CTS2. NCI plans to offer REST APIs that can support the requirements of its own and others’ applications, and expects a significant component to be REST services from the RDF triple store. An obvious test case is ability to support EVS browser functionality (even while these browsers will likely use the Java API for some time to come).
We face some immediate needs from other users, notably CTRP and GDC, so need to clarify design approaches and produce new services based on them in the relatively near term.

Agenda

Continue discussion around what is missing from current REST CTS2 service. (All)

OWL2 considerations
- Statement
- BNode (not supported purely in CTS2)
- No canonical RDF Spec for CTS2
Modeling considerations (for example Neoplasm)
- Flattening of content necessary to represent in LexEVS
- There are things that were not able to be represented in LexEVS nor CTS2.
  - Issues
    - Restrictions bundled together in role groups
    - Ability to represent conjunctions and disjunctions.
    - within a given cancer, there are multiple prognosis - but will be flattened and nonsensical.
Relationship between LexEVS and graph or RDF/SPARQL
- Support for partonomy
GDC groups
Value Set complexity
Mapping considerations
- current LexEVS CTS2 support - search and complex construction
Available CTS2 services
- LexEVS widely known service today.
- Research is looking for a mature standard. However there are gaps in functionality currently implemented.
- Suggested that someone represent LexEVS at the FHIR table at HL7.

Next Steps