Pre- vs. Post-Coordination in Semantic Annotations

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Pre- vs. Post-Coordination in Semantic Annotations

• George Komatsoulis

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Pre- vs. Post-Coordinated Concepts

• There is usually more than one way to annotate
  some concepts
• Pre-coordinated Create/use a concept in EVS that
  fully describes the attribute
• Property Primary Gleason Score
• Post Coordinated Use several concepts to
  describe the attribute
• Property Gleason Score
• PropertyQualifier1 Primary
• Currently the caDSR only supports ordered
  qualifiers (this problem is being addressed)
• The general principle for using pre- vs.
  post-coordinated concepts is to use
  post-coordination unless there is semantic value
  that can be gained by using the pre-coordinated
  concept

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Examples for pre-coordination

• When using qualifiers would reduce or eliminate
  semantic clarity
• Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia
• When using qualifiers would prevent semantic
  clarity later on, usually because there are
  numerous derived attributes, or because the
  phrase is absolutely central to our activities.
• Clinical Trial should be a single concept
  because we will see many other related
  attributes, i.e. Clinical Trial Protocol,
  Clinical Trial Protocol Start Date, etc.

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Examples that should use post-coordination

• Date
• beginDate, endDate, dateModified
• Name
• preferredName, alternateName,
• Indicator
• deleteIndicator, latestVersionIndicator
• Identifier/ID
• publicID, locuslinkID,