Tom, I have pondered the same issue before. I think it unlikely that language would change inside an entry, but I did think of the possibility of medicines, e.g. chinese medicines, or part thereof, being described by specificly foreign names.
cheers, eric [ btw, you may wish to check your computer's date/time. I know Queensland lags in some respects, but 3 days would make the cows very sore! :-)] -------------------------------------------------------------------- On Sun, 7 Mar 2004, Thomas Beale wrote: > > A couple of technical questions prior to declaring the 0.9 baseline in > openEHR: > > One of the major openEHR implementors here in Australia has suggested > moving the attributes 'language' and 'charset' in the class DV_TEXT to > some higher level class - e.g. COMPOSITION, since almost all the time it > is the same on DV_TEXT items in a given EHR. We don't think it should be > that high, since language cannot be guaranteed the same throughout a > COMPOSITION (in their scheme, you would set the attribute on COMPOSITION > and then override it on lower nodes if they were different; however, I > am very wary of this sort of logic - HL7 uses it a lot and it really > complicates things for developers; at the moment we prefer to avoid it > completely). One possibility is to move the language attribute to the > ENTRY class, on the basis that an ENTRY is the minimium indivisible unit > of information in openEHR (this is true, even for 'large' Entries like a > microbiology test result). It was initially on DV_TEXT for safety > reasons - you would always know what language a text fragment is in > (this is important for words which are the same apearance but different > meaning in different languages); however, ENTRY is probably just as safe > from this point of view. > > Q: can anyone think of a scenario where there could be multiple > languages inside an ENTRY? > > Character set is more difficult to work out. So far, we have specified > that Unicode should be used in all strings. This means that in theory > there is no need to record the character set name (e.g. iso-latin-1, > iso-greek, etc). However, there is still a need to choose between UTF-8, > UTF-16 and so on in Unicode. And in any case, I am unsure if all > implementation technologies implement unicode in strings; is there a > legacy reason to store non-unicode character set names anyway? > > - thomas beale > > > > - > If you have any questions about using this list, > please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org > - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
