Identification and formal representation of change operations in LOINC evolution

LOINC (Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes) is one of the standardized health ontologies that is widely used by practitioners in the health sector. Like other ontologies in health field, LOINC evolves. This research focuses on representing formally the conceptual changes in LOINC. Four steps are taken to achieve this goal. First, the release of LOINC is studied to get an overview of the changes in LOINC. Secondly, the change operations that occur in LOINC are classified. Third, the changes are represented formally by considering the need to keep the history of changes in concepts. Finally, a few algorithms are developed to identify changes that occur between two releases of LOINC. The evaluation shows that the algorithms are able to identify change operations in LOINC with 100 of success rate. With a formal representation of changes that occur in LOINC, it is expected that adjustments to applications that use LOINC can be performed more straightforward. The history of reference to concepts in LOINC can also be traced back so that information about the changes on the reference can be obtained easily. © 2018 The Science and Information (SAI) Organization Limited.