Andrew Williams and Maxim Moinat raised the issue of whether folks coming from non-NAACCR sources should map their tumor characteristics to the NAACCR vocabulary. It was argued folks should map to NAACCR so we can make tumor registry data and non-tumor registry data comparable. It was pointed out the problem arises that just saying that we should pick the “standard” concept for each tumor characteristic runs into the “Choose Your Own Adventure” problem that OMOP contains multiple “standard” concepts for many tumor characteristics semantic concepts. The approach we have agreed as a group to take is to choose NAACCR as our standard for tumor characteristics for the time being until we can map NAACCR to a more proper standardized vocabulary like SNOMED or LOINC. Hopefully via the Nebraska Lexicon. See the
Presentation from June 18 where this issue was discussed. It sounds like this issue is still open for debate. An alternative to using NAACCR as the standardized tumor characteristics vocabulary is to let people use whatever seems right and depend on the mapping between concepts being worked out at the analysis stage. This issue can be discussed at the hackathon.