15:03:11 RRSAgent has joined #hcls 15:03:11 logging to http://www.w3.org/2015/08/05-hcls-irc 15:03:13 RRSAgent, make logs world 15:03:13 Zakim has joined #hcls 15:03:15 Zakim, this will be HCLS 15:03:15 I do not see a conference matching that name scheduled within the next hour, trackbot 15:03:16 Meeting: Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group Teleconference 15:03:16 Date: 05 August 2015 15:03:39 hey gang 15:03:43 hi eric 15:03:53 joining? 15:29:34 Topic: Decimal precision 15:29:36 Eric: Not ambiguity, but an invitation for systems to do the wrong thing. Not that 12.0000 is ambiguous, but that it's easy for someone to say that and not mean it. If you call out the precision in a separate property they you eliminate the chances that someone will printf 4.2 , and you make it directly queryable. But the downside is that digits are a coarse way of providing error bars, instead of +0.3 -0.1. Once we find the use cases we can ask if we wa 15:29:36 nt to meet them and how. 15:29:36 lloyd: If someone spits out precision that isn't there, they may do that with an explicit attribute. If they don't declare precision and we discard trailing zeros. Implementations that care may have to look for it both explicitly and implicitly. 15:29:55 rhausam has joined #HCLS 15:30:13 lloyd: I would expext most systems to display what they are given. 15:31:11 david: I would expect data to have fields of standard widths. 15:34:48 paul: I'm looking at my latest medical record, and my height is shown to three digits. 15:41:59 lloyd: i don't see the value in having explicit precision. 15:42:25 david: what use cases for knowing precision? 15:42:56 lloyd: primarily comparing values. Two values 3.0 and 3.001 are close enough. 15:44:06 david: But we routinely compare for 'close enough' anyway, such as 'within 1%' 15:45:06 eric: Given that medicine already has conventions around the use of trailing zeros, we wouldn't be done with a precision bit is added . . . [ eric dropped] 15:45:11 ! 15:45:18 eric, coming back? 15:46:12 eric: it would have to go back to make the lab equipment emit that information. 15:49:11 lloyd: Possible that there may be 1, 2 or 10 extraneous digits that are not significant. But it typically gets corrected downstream, or viewed as an error. 15:50:43 paul: if the digits of precision are significant, then what's the harm in making them explicit? 15:51:20 lloyd: one FHIR principle, is that FHIR does not drive system behavior. FHIR won't make people do things that the 15:51:27 ... that they are not doing already. 15:52:41 ... existing systems don't explicitly capture precision, so we can't make a good argument of requiring it. 15:54:09 david: what if interoperability conflicts with existing system behavior? 15:54:43 lloyd: FHIR helps systems exchange whatever they have. Conformance framework allows the bar to be raised for better interop. 15:55:16 ... FHIR has a very low bar to entry, then makes it easy to make incremental improvements. 15:56:42 david: I agree that an big bang assumption of achieving full interop would be too much, but I think it's important to have a bias toward encouraging interop. 16:05:07 david: it seems a shame to have to represent numbers as strings. what we'd really like is a precisionDecimal datatype that is widely implemented. But we don't have that. 16:05:34 ... In any case, I don't think this will impact the FHIR RDF decision that we made yesterday. 16:06:09 ADJOURNED 16:06:25 Present: Paul Courtney, EricP, Lloyd, DBooth 16:06:32 Chair: David Booth 16:06:39 rrsagent, draft minutes 16:06:39 I have made the request to generate http://www.w3.org/2015/08/05-hcls-minutes.html dbooth_ 17:16:56 Zakim has left #hcls