The semantic web as "perfection seeking": A view from drug terminology

To date, the Semantic Web has viewed formal terminology, or ontology, as either immutable, or something that can change but that has no past and no future - only a present. Change, or process - such as "perfection seeking," is outside the scope of the proposed "semantics," except in so far as it is represented in attributes. In contrast, current U.S. Government efforts to formalize drug (medication) terminology are being driven by the need to manage changes in this terminology asynchronously and longitudinally, For example, each year the FDA (Federal Drug Administration) approves about 150 new drugs and thousands of changes to the "label" of existing drugs, the VHA (Veterans Health Administration) must manage new drugs, label changes, and tens of thousands of drug "packaging" changes, and the NLM (National Library of Medicine) must maintain a current index of references to proposed or approved medications in the world's biomedical literature. We propose that an emerging multi-federal-agency reference terminology model for medications, mRT, be used to drive development of the necessary repertoire of "semantic" change management mechanisms for the Semantic Web, and that these "process" mechanisms be organized into an ontology of change.