NucLexNuclear Medicine Lexicon and Theranostics Ontology
Stage W0: private living prototype12 of 30 manuscripts drafted, 0 reviewed; 50 lexicon entries in draftWhat each later stage would need to show

Ontology as economic infrastructure

Provenance and evidence

A statement in a knowledge base is only as good as the record of where it came from and who checked it.

MonographBriefNX-M12Proposed length 2,500 to 5,000 words

Writing brief. This monograph has been assigned but the manuscript is not yet written or approved. What follows is the commissioning brief: its question, outline, evidence instructions, and review requirements.

Central question

Where did a statement come from?

Reader promise

The reader will be able to ask six separate questions of any assertion: what source it rests on, what evidence in that source bears on it, how it was derived, who asserted it, who reviewed it, and which version it belongs to; and will see what happens when one answer changes.

Required development

  1. Separate the six components. Define source (the document or dataset), evidence (the specific content bearing on the claim), derivation (the reasoning from evidence to claim), attribution (who claimed), review (who checked and what they decided), and version. Show that each can be present while another is missing.
  2. Trace one claim end to end. Choose a single synthetic assertion of the kind NucLex would hold, for example that a teaching radiopharmaceutical concept has a given radionuclide as a component, and build its full record: source, passage, derivation, author, reviewer disposition, version. Label every identifier as local.
  3. Explain corrections. Show the record when the source is found not to support the claim, when a better source appears, and when the claim is withdrawn. The earlier state stays visible; a correction is a new version, not an overwrite. Connect to the genomic reclassification example in Precision nuclear oncology.
  4. Distinguish provenance of a statement from provenance of data. Explain how the W3C PROV model (entities, activities, agents) applies to an editorial claim and where it needs supplementing with review state.
  5. Connect to review authority. A machine-generated proposal with a complete evidence record is still a proposal; link forward to Human review of machine proposals.

Evidence and review

Evidence to obtain: the W3C PROV-O and PROV-DM recommendations; the SSSOM specification for mapping-level justification and confidence fields; SNOMED International's documentation on component versioning (effective time and active flag) as a worked example of version-preserving correction; the guidance's sourcing protocol (section 9) as the standard this monograph must itself meet.

Review concern: no NucLex evidence record may be described as implemented. It is a proposed design illustrated with a synthetic case.

Provenance, Evidence, Uncertainty, Human review, Identifier, Data quality, Precision nuclear oncology, Human review of machine proposals, FHIR terminology resources, Semantic interoperability.

Review requirements

Source check of each citation against the precise claim attached to it, not merely for existence. Domain review by someone with ontology curation or terminology governance experience. Editorial check that all six components appear in the worked example and that corrections preserve prior states.

Review gate for this monograph

Check that a citation supports the precise claim.

The assignment exists. The manuscript has not been written or approved.