[Data-modeling] Medicine domain will not cover veterinary medicine or phytopathology

[Faye Li]

Hi,

Is there any objection for designating the current Medicine domain as 
the domain for *human* medical and health data, and thus will not 
include medical/health data on animals and plants?

Human medicine, veterinary medicine and plant diseases are such 
different fields that even though some of the schemata may look similar, 
the data will certainly not be. Even when a disease affects both humans 
and animals, the associated transmission methods, symptoms, 
complications, and treatments are often drastically different. Instead 
of lumping them together, it makes more sense to use co-typing to keep 
the data clean and simple. Queries will be simpler and shorter too: 
going through instances of the Physician type looking for a cardiologist 
will not require the additional property constraint that you're looking 
for a specialist of the *human* heart, looking up causes for "cardiac 
arrest" will not yield the surprising topic of chocolate (which applies 
to dogs, but not humans).

The same principle applies to other types in this domain as well. For 
example, the Muscle type only contains muscles in the human body, the 
Hospital type does not include pet hospitals, and "feline panleukopenia" 
should not be co-typed as a "Disease or medical condition" in the 
Medicine domain.

Does that sound reasonable? If so, I'll clarify the type definitions in 
that domain to indicate that scope, and start cleaning up the data. Any 
comments?

-- Faye