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Concept Id 0 should be a standard concept?

General
#1

Hello, OHDSI members! There is a question: test for standard concept explicitly excludes concept_ID zero. On the other hand concept_ID=0 is valid for any column holding a concept id and therefore concept_id = 0 shold be classified as standard. So I see here ambiguity. @Christian_Reich wonders about the way to fix this

How do you query standard concepts?
Check for concept_id !=0?
Check for standard_concept=‘S’
other choice (Atlas, Hades, etc.)

#2

This is a continuation of the discussion in Github.

#3

@dmitry.buralkin @Christian_Reich Could you be so kind tagging the “main tool builders”?

#5

I check for a standard concept_id using WHERE standard_concept = ‘S’. Now sometimes I also need to check to ensure the concept_id is in the proper domain, so I add AND domain_id = '".

Doesn’t work because non-standard (aka source concepts) concept_ids != 0

I click on ‘standard’ in the standard concept dropdown to limit my search

#6

Also, I read the GitHub message chain. We should change the documentation. concept_id = 0, ‘no matching concept’, is not and should not be a standard concept. It is our way of saying we don’t have a standard concept_id to represent the idea of interest. Updating the documentation to allow for concept_id = 0 when a standard concept_id can not be found allows us to not change anything with our software tools, bonus!

#7

From a philosophical perspective, this is head on. We have a Closed World paradigm, and only facts are recorded. Concept 0 is a violation of this. It is a compromise, because we know there is a fact but we cannot record it using a standard concept for whatever reason. We could have decided to leave it NULL, but that choice has been made long ago and is now set.

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