Re: surrogate key or not?

On Wednesday 28 July 2004 06:59 am, Iain wrote:

> > couldnt you do something like, let them write the 'long flaky text', and
>
> at
>
> > the same time mark a certain number of key words or key phrases which
>
> could
>
> > be stored and retrieved?
>
> I was thinking along similar lines. On one hand, you need the "long flaky
> text" (love that expression), on the other, you want to ensure that you can
> locate appropriate data, and that the required details are available. By
> available, I mean that it was entered in the first place, and that it is
> retrievable. I imagine a system whereby you define keywords and attributes
> for them (attributes would be an episode date, or dosage, etc). The memo,
> is checked for keywords and the doctor prompted to supply the attributes
> for them. If your parsing was smart, and the memo formated a little, you
> could conceivably pull a lot of this out of the memo as defaults. The
> processing could also be done retrospectively by an intern or researcher,
> but I imagine it would be best to have the doctor do it at the time.

simpler, as a first stage and easily implemented, give him some way he can
tag words and phrases he feels important. save these in a table along with a
foreign key identifying the source. as a second stage keep analysing the
words and phrases chosen and empirically build up a database of significant
words and phrases relevant to that specific installation (or doctor), and as
a third stage, highlight these as he types in the data
--
regards
kg

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