Looking for documentation that "http://radlex.org/RID/" is the proper URL prefix for RadLex IDs

[Gaurav Vaidya]

Hi there!

I’m trying to find some documentation that "http://radlex.org/RID/" is the proper URL prefix needed to convert a RadLex ID (such as RID39224, “mean value calculated") into a URL to represent this concept in RDF applications (such as "http://www.radlex.org/RID/RID39224”). This is clearly suggested by https://radlex.org, where these URLs are provided for every entry in the “PURL” field (and are even resolvable, which is great!), but I haven’t been able to find the documentation of the PURL field or a description of the method for constructing this URL on the RadLex website or in the main RadLex paper. Does anybody on this list know if this is documented somewhere else?

The reason I’m asking this is because I’m working with the FHIR RDF subgroup [1] to build a software tool for automatically converting an RDF URL (such as "http://www.radlex.org/RID/RID39224”) into a system/code pair in FHIR (in this case, system=http://radlex.org, code=RID39224) and vice versa. We could note that  "http://radlex.org/RID/" is generally used as an URL prefix or “IRI stem" to do this conversion, but it would be better for us if there were an official source for this that we could cite. Ideally, I’m hoping to find a paragraph that explains how to identify RadLex concepts as resources in RDF, as section 12.7.2 of the LOINC Users’ Guide does for LOINC [2].

Thank you so much for your attention!

Cheers,
Gaurav Vaidya
Semantic Web Technologist, Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI)

[1] https://confluence.hl7.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=66922543 
[2] https://loinc.org/kb/users-guide/recommendations-for-best-practices-in-using-and-mapping-to-loinc/#using-uris-to-identify-loinc-artifacts