Tim Cook wrote: >On Sat, 2004-03-06 at 10:08, Thompson, Ken wrote: > > >>Do you thing that a document being informally saved by an automated process >>designed to support recovery of the document should be subject to the same >>modification constraints as a formally saved document? >> >> > >I would say that the data is not a formal document until a deliberate >action is made by the creator to commit it as such. > >Does anyone know if there is any existing legal precedent on this? > > don't know about the legal precendents, but the openEHR specifications model this notion of versions and committal explicitly; they will be even more visible in the EHR service model we are producing. If the "commit" action performed by the user is implemented by bundling of version changes into change sets, and a proper two-phase transaction protocol, then it is easy to know if it worked or not - the operation won't succeed unless it really has worked at the transaction level, and the user will know that in the GUI (it is easy to post a message saying that it failed). The only question then is whether the client side (or even server side) software implemented some kind of caching (like MS autosave files) - and whether you can get back to the previous position by accessing something in a cache rather than redoing the changes from scratch. Client-side file caching is probably a security hole, but memory caching is safe enough.
- thomas beale - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
