Plan for Concepts Representing Role in Product Hierarchy

The UK agree that it is necessary to remove concepts representing role from the main product hierarchy. This is a known problem and results in false inheritance.

It is not clear from the proposals as documented exactly which concepts are identified for retirement. Will there be any grouper concepts between the 373873005 | Pharmaceutical / biologic product (product) and the Medicinal Entity concepts ? If not this will mean a likely 5000+ children of the concept 373873005 | Pharmaceutical / biologic product (product) which will make browsing the hierarchy difficult. Not necessarily a reason not to do it but something to be aware of.

The proposal seems to be to retire these role type concepts and then possibly recreate them at a later date as a separate piece of work. It would create less content churn and reduce the impact on implementers if those concepts that may be re-created at a later stage are retained and relocated within a separate sub hierarchy of products rather than retired and recreated.

The timing of this work relative to the plan to relocate “products with strength” to an separate extension or module is important since some concepts likely to be moved and are children of these grouper concepts. Retirement of the parent role concept would presumably leave them without a stated parent in SCT unless there are plans to provide at least some maintenance of the extension/module. It would be better if this work could be carried out before the creation of the unmaintained extension to reduce this effect.

Currently there is some reorganising of grouper concepts in the substance hierarchy we believe that some of the substance concepts have been retired with a SAME_AS relationship being created to a grouper in the product hierarchy. If this replacement concept is also to be retired soon this does not seem like a helpful thing to do.

Hi Ian

Have the Drug Products Groups reached an agreement on this? If not should they not before we make any advice from this AG?

Kell also mentioned that there is talk about establishing an IHTSDO Pharmacy AG - would this not be the correct place to discuss this first?

Can we be provided with couple of examples of concepts that are in scope for this proposal?

Thanks.

Feedback regarding the disposition of concepts representing roles is being received from multiple stakeholder groups but issues submitted are being consolidated into a single feedback document located in the Plan for Concepts Representing Role in Product Hierarchy folder under the Documents section of this site. Please continue to submit comments via this discussion thread. Thank you.

Apologies for the tardiness of this response.

There has been dicsussion in New Zealand and agreement that this is a resonable step to take.

However, there is interest that there will be a "new method" for creating and using concepts representing roles and; what this will entail, and the timeframe of this project. It is anticipated that 'role' will be useful for future decisoin support tools.

Thanks