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Fleshing out "standardized"

Vocabulary Users
#1

Hi!

I’m getting hung up on what it means for something to be “standardized”. I know there’s the “OMOP Standardized Vocabulary”, "Standard Concept"s, and a whole bunch of "Standardized {table category name}"s. I’m wondering about this because all of the table categories on the CDM wiki are called “Standardized”.

Given its importance, it might be worth reserving the term "standard’ for technically “standard” or “standardized” things according to some explicit definition (ideally one provided in the wiki glossary).

My questions are:

  1. What does it mean for the groups of tables to be “standardized”?
  2. If I define my own source to concept mapping, are my “Standardized Vocabularies” tables still “standardized”?
  3. It looks like the CDM documentation is housed on GitHub, this stopped me from contributing because wiki content doesn’t seem to carry over to forked repositories.

Thanks!

Mustafa

#2

Just wanted to share: after helpful discussion with colleagues, it seems like considering “standard” in context is the best way to approach the above questions.

I’ll admit to digging too deep, on occasion :sweat_smile:

Thanks!

#3

@mustafaascha:

You made my day! A dramatic rant, followed by an answer by yourself! :slight_smile: Keep doing it.

On second thought I actually agree with you that there is a certain inflation of the word “standard”. We use it too much to mean different things:

  • centrally managed
  • representative
  • mandatory use

It’s probably too late in the game to fix it, but going forward we should be more frugal. We are sensitized now.

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