Thursday, May 17, 2007

HL7 and BRIDG

The NCBO organized a Clinical Trial Ontology Workshop at the NIH in Bethesda, MD on 16-17 May. Two talks, especially, were of relevance to HL7, given HL7's influential role in the BRIDG project. The first, by Werner Ceusters, pointed to certain problems with BRIDG, which might be resolved by means of a principled ontology of the clinical trial domain.
The second, by Barry Smith, raised certain issues as to the apparent conflict between what seem to be two goals underlying BRIDG, to serve both as a descriptive representation of protocol-driven clinical research and to serve as a prescriptive standardization of such research.
BRIDG representatives at the meeting pointed to the new release of BRIDG, which is due in June 2007, and in which, we are told, some of these problems will be addressed.

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