Well, you pre-coordinate for the source (despite it’s a question-answer pair), while you post-coordinate in the Standard target (despite, the OMOP wants the facts).
What if you have a fancy set of pre-coordinated alcohol consumption facts/concepts? The same as we proposed for smoking. You don’t want to move all the extra garbage to the target/Standard side, right? So why would you need to keep the survey being Standard?
It’s already a problem when you try to map alcohol consumption to a proper target, look how many Athena has. What if we’ll add a couple more Survey vocabs soon?
The survey is not the only case where these additional fields are useful. Complex oncology, survey, lab tests data, and all the stuff around the MAPPING table requires us to re-evaluate the definition of the source data fact:
- Is it still a single entity or concatenated combination of 2-3 of them?
- Or it’s always a set of specific entities so that we can not concatenate, but JOIN using several fields at once? Here is an example enriched with UKB mappings (mappings of questions to themselves are in red).
So I feel we’re about some changes around it anyway.