Hello Everyone,

Maggie: Please forward this to John Holmes … I don't have his email yet.

These are the minutes from today's Ontology Mapper con call.  (It is interesting to note that when we started this project we saw a big jump in contributions when we applied for the CTSA grant.  After the CTSA grant our team size/involvement deflated slightly but now that our research paper publications are under way, the OntoMapper project is now back at full strength again!)

Present were Rob, Marco, Prakash, Brenton, Maggie, Liat, John Holmes (welcome), Mark Weiner, William Digrazio (Paul Norris is on vacation … if we eventually include Vivian, Davera, Gail, Boris and Stuart that will put us back at 15 people again!)

Covered in our call:

1) Maggie has requested that we set up a milestone based Microsoft Project schedule for our paper authoring works.  We do have such a schedule for if/when we get the CTSA grant.  But we don't have such a schedule for our current phase.  Rob will work with Gail Harden to get that published.

2) Marco and Prakash are just about ready to begin checking code into our revision control system.  Accounts on Dynamsoft will be sent out to Marco, Prakash and Maggie.  (Our published work will be on Source Forge but Rob would prefer that our interim builds be held in a private space until we have OntoMapper running in production.  So our development builds will be on Dynamsoft and we will switch over to Source Forge once we get version 1 published).

3) Prakash has an early version of our Proof of Concept running for the Mapping Interpreter.  This work will help Prakash and Marco more accurately document their requirements.  This work also radically lowers the risks associated with this project as it can provide us with proof that the system will in fact work once completed.

4) Maggie is still working on the next version of our Lifecycle paper and will likely be ready for the next round of review next week.  Maggie has also introduced John Holmes.  John Holmes and UCSF's Boris Bastian will be working on the workflow types (with Mark Weiners help as well!).  John as a clinical background and Boris has a basic science background.  Rob will try to have Boris join the call starting next week.

5) Marco got i2b2 running locally at U. Rochester to assist him in the further work on our database design.  Now Marco needs further schema assistance and Rob will help get Vivian involved from Partners at this point.  Also Marco and Prakash need to begin coordinating their efforts (see below).

Not yet discussed:

It seems likely that Prakash will need assistance from Marco.  Likely extensions that will be needed by Prakash include:

1) Access to the concept ID and name to use when identifying a mapping rule and Davera had suggested that we assign a mapping rule ID and that does show up in Stuart's data model.

2) Access to a Translated Flag to mark a source record as already translated.  This flag would be set before Prakash issues a "commit" following a single rules execution.  That way if the system crashes (yikes) then i2b2 would be able to pick up where it left off, and continue the execution of the rest of the rules.  When a new version of a datum is imported during an update (as a result of an ETL process) then that same flag would be left unset as a way to alert the OntoMapper that the new version of that data again needs to be mapped.

3) We may need to store information in the schema that identifies how to throttle CPU usage for the mapping interpreter.  We don't want to Mapping Interpreter to impact the system performance of the UIs and queries in production.

We are counting the days until Davis can rejoin the group!   :-)

All the best,

Rob