What is the rationale and use case for Standard Concepts being mapped to themselves?
Is that property used for something in the shared OHDSI tools?
Just for convenience. When ETLing, you map every incoming concept. If it already is standard, it will refer to itself. If not, if will give you the standard concept. You don’t have to test before. Of course, you still could do that.
Does it mean that there is no logic in any of the shared tools that relies on traversing “Maps to” relationship until it maps to itself, which would fail if such a map is not found?
Basically, my question is - what is the potential problem with adding custom concepts to CONCEPT table without mapping the custom standard concept to itself in CONCEPT_RELATIONSHIP for the purposes of using analytic tools?
Well, if it is for ETL and you have custom concepts you need to map them to standard concepts you can do that whichever way you want. But custom concepts should be non-standard. Standard concepts are publicly shared in the community.
For analytics, you should use Standard concepts, no matter how they came about – by following the “Maps to” to itself, by just placing them because they have Standard designation, by following the “Maps to” from a source concept or by custom mapping them from a local source code. Analytics using non-standard concepts will inevitably violate the idea of a network, because their use is not sanctioned and no tool or script will work with them. If you want to carry out your own custom analytics exclusively on your own data – you are free to do whatever you like.
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