Minutes: 

The LDIP committee had a conference call 3/31/06 from 1:00 to 
2:00 PM. 

Attending: 
Bob Leif 
Jules Berman 
Bruce BEckwith 
Al Floyd  
Andy Lowe 
Fiona Ginty 
Bill Moore  
Kemp Watson 
Ul Balis 
Bruce Friedman 
Tony Pan

Notes: 

1. Minutes from the prior ldip conference call,  
Feb. 24, 2006, were approved. 

2. Jules raised the issue that there are a number of ldip members 
who neither attend ldip conference calls nor participate in  
task groups.  Jules suggested that these people could just be 
dropped from the ldip listserver.  The point was raised that 
we needed a policy for dropping ldip members.  Jules indicated 
that ldip membership was determined by the API Council and that 
a mechanism for dropping ldip members was already established and  
involved the ldip chair petitioning the API Council. 
It was decided that Jules would go ahead and prepare the list 
of non-participating ldip members, that he would present the 
list to the API Council, and (if the Council approves) he will 
notify the listed members that they would be dropped.  Anyone 
on the list who objects to being dropped will be put back onto 
the listserver if they state an interest in becoming active.  
In other words, nobody from the drop list who indicates that they 
want to work within ldip will be dropped. 

3. The specimen task group presented their tentative  
list of data elements.  The draft is currently available  
for viewing at:  http://www.gwmoore.org/ldip/spcmncde.htm 
Bob Leif indicated that it needs fluroescence and antibody 
data elements, and that he would work with Bill Moore to 
provide these. 

Jules indicated that each element needed to be defined and 
put into ISO-11179 format.  Bill Moore indicated that he  
could do that if Jules sent him a sample case.  Jules  
sent the following URL for the tissue microarray CDEs: 
http://www.pathologyinformatics.org/tma_cde.htm  

It was indicated that the specimen element would need to 
have subspecimen attributes (a specimen can be part of 
another specimen).  There was discussion that we should 
be using relationships (such as is_a, has_a, is_part_of) that 
have been used by other biological ontologies.  Bill Moore 
indicated that he would visit the OBO (open biomedical ontologies) 
site to get this information (http://obo.sourceforge.net/) 

4. We discussed the March 22, 2006 W3C recommendations for image 
specifications/annotations at:   

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-swbp-image-annotation-20060322/ 

It was noted that their recommendations were almost precisely 
what we were doing in ldip.  It was noted that W3C recommended 
an OWL extension of RDF, and Jules indicated that we could 
easily modify our current work to use OWL syntax. 

5. HL7 metadata update. Bob Leif reported that the HL7 people 
were not providing him with CDEs.  I said that I would contact 
John Gilbertson to try to get him to send us HL7 CDEs relevant to 
ldip. 

6. Ul Balis has sent us the Dicom Metadata .xls file.  We 
reviewed the annotated elements, and Bob Leif offered to  
add datatyping for each of the listed elements. 

7. Tony Pan (file task group) and Kemp Watson (Binary task group) 
offered to present for their task groups at the next scheduled 
ldip conference call. 

The call was adjourned at 2:00 PM. 

- Jules Berman