TIME-ITEM

TIME-ITEM is an ontology of Topics that describes the content of undergraduate medical education. TIME is an acronym for "Topics for Indexing Medical Education"; ITEM is an acronym for "Index de thèmes pour l’éducation médicale." Version 1.0 of the taxonomy has been released and the web application that allows users to work with it is still under development. Its developers are seeking more collaborators to expand and validate the taxonomy and to guide future development of the web application.

The development of TIME-ITEM began at the University of Ottawa in 2006. It was initially developed to act as a content index for a curriculum map being constructed there. After its initial presentation at the 2006 conference of the Canadian Association for Medical Education, early collaborators included the University of British Columbia, McMaster University and Queen's University.

The TIME-ITEM ontology is unique in that it is designed specifically for undergraduate medical education. As such, it includes fewer strictly biomedical entries than other common medical vocabularies (such as MeSH or SNOMED CT) but more entries relating to the medico-social concepts of communication, collaboration, professionalism, etc.

Topics within TIME-ITEM are arranged poly-hierarchically, meaning any Topic can have more than one parent. Relationships are established based on the logic that learning about a Topic contributes to the learning of all its parent Topics.

In addition to housing the ontology of Topics, the TIME-ITEM web application can house multiple Outcome frameworks. All Outcomes, whether private Outcomes entered by single institutions or publicly available medical education Outcomes (such as CanMeds 2005) are hierarchically linked to one or more Topics in the ontology. In this way, the contribution of each Topic to multiple Outcomes is made explicit.

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