Definitely a design session would be good. But let me see if I can argue that my proposed design does what you want, or try to understand why it doesn’t.
Most of the complexity we’ve been dealing with, I believe, is due to cross-vocabulary relationships. There are very complex individual vocabularies, like SNOMED, but on their own and from the local perspective of a single concept, I believe they are not that difficult to navigate.
I’m sure your point #3 is right, @Christian_Reich, that it’s possible to design better navigation tools if we allow customization to particular contexts. But the context wouldn’t need to be, e.g., a vocabulary-independent ingredient. We can start from Metformin in a specific vocabulary like RxNorm. Then if we want to navigate to classes we can wander over to ATC, if we want indications we can go to that vocabulary, etc. With the layout I’ve proposed, even if a user didn’t have much familiarity with the different vocabularies, they would get a sense of what was available, at least in other vocabularies with concepts directly linked to the concept under inspection. For some vocabularies, like SNOMED, it would probably be ideal to customize navigation depending on the concept under inspection, but for most, a consistent navigation UI would probably suffice, and, I suspect, a single navigation UI would probably do ok across all the vocabularies if we confine ourselves to insular (intra-vocabulary) hierarchical relationships and direct inter-vocabulary relationships.
To address your list of problems:
- Medically meaningful relationships (like ‘Anatomical site of’) vs navigational/hierarchical relationships (‘Is a’, ‘Equivalent of’)
With both of these types of relationships, again, I believe that most of the complexity is removed and most of the meaning is retained with intra-vocabulary navigation and hopping across vocabularies to go from source to standard, standard to source, or to follow relationship types not available in the vocabulary under inspection.
- One related concept/parent/child vs a few relateds/parents/children vs many many relateds/parents/children
Again, I suspect most of the link explosion is cross-vocabulary.
- Non-standard vs. standard concepts, where we want to discourage the use of non-standard ones (they are not compatible with the CDMs that are ETLed from other coding schemes, we really need to wean people off those ICD9s).
With shading and record counts I think we get the best of both worlds: people navigate where they want, but they clearly see when they are in neighborhoods not attached to patient records and how to move towards neighborhoods that are.
- If we want a single standard navigator of things, it proboably needs to have two views simultaneously:
- An overview topological view where we are (like a dot on the US map), and
This would be really great. If anyone has funding to work on it, I hope you’ll think of me
- A local view (the streets around my house in Cambridge).
That’s what my proposal addresses, right?
- We need to have “flexible” design elements depending on the size of the topological neighborhood:
Totally agree.
So, please let me know if I’m misunderstanding the challenges, or if I need to be clearer about what I’m proposing. Thanks!