Christian Heller wrote: >>Christian, you may have misunderstood - the 'meaning' fields in an >>archetype are the node-level ids - which also double as codes, whose >>meaning is given in the lower part of the archetype. See for example >>http://www.openehr.org/repositories/archetype/latest/adl/archetypes/openehr >>/ehr/entry/observation/openehr-ehr-observation.apgar_result.draft.adl.html - >>those codes in magenta in the main part of the archetype are 'meaning' >>values; the name of this field is what we are proposing to rename >> >> > >You mean for example "at0000" at "OBSERVATION" is a meaning/id? O.k. >In this case it seems you follow a different design than I thought. >Are "OBSERVATION", "HISTORY" and smaller nodes archetypes for you? >In my understanding of a world made of hierarchical models they would be. >If they are knowledge models (archetypes) themselves, I would put each >of them into their own file. Instead of using local ids, one could then >reference archetypes over their file name. > > in general, it is useful for one archetype to provide structure for a number of nodes - the 'micro-structure' of a business object if you like. If the object in question is an instance of the Observation class in the openEHR EHR information model then a typical archetype provides a model not just of the Observation node itself, but of all the pieces inside. The best way to see this apart from ADL examples, is to use the ADL workbench (get it from http://www.openehr.org/repositories/implem-dev/latest/publishing/tools/windows/index.html) on the example archetypes (get them from http://www.openehr.org/repositories/archetype/archetype-latest.tgz). You get a folding explorer view of an archetype, and you can see quite easily why it makes sense for the one archetype to provide the model of Observation all the way down to Element objects.
But...there is nothing to stop you having an archetype for an Observation which stops at History, and then invokes another archetype for the History you want. This is what archetype slots are for. An example of archetype slots can be found in various archetypes in the archive - e.g. the Section archetypes, but also a medication order archetype. The process of using separate archetypes for smaller and smaller pieces can indeed continue to the point where there is a separate archetype for each node in a data hierarchy, but our work so far shows that in general, this isn't particularly useful - we tend to re-use larger lumps than single nodes. (But again - someone might prove that wrong). - thomas - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
