Christian Heller wrote:
>Hi Thomas,
>
>taking the risk of being too philosophical, I reply to the list anyway.
>
>
>
you took the risk and you were;-) But that's ok, we like philosophy here...
to briefly reply/paraphrase your remarks: you are suggesting that the
current split between the reference model in openEHR and archetypes is
nothing special, why not just have an object model of 1 or 2 classes
representing 'thing', and do everything in archetypes? This is certainly
theoretically possible - you would probably want a few more types, basic
data types and data structures are useful. We have stayed with the split
we have in openEHR because:
* the world is not yet ready for having nothing at all in the software;
* we still need software to do basic computing tasks like creating
data, storing it, querying it etc. Most people's understanding of
that is based in an OO paradigm of classes and attributes. I agree
that in the future we might be able to move onto systems where
everything is done in archeytpe processing, but the health
informatics world is not yet ready for that. You only have to look
at models being built in CEN EN13606, HL7, IHE, ISO etc to see that.
* the part of the ontology that is in the reference model is that
part which people can agree is domain-invariant, i.e. always has
the same meaning (i.e. an Observation is an Observation is an
Observation, not matter what of). This means they can safely write
software and create data and it will work in current technology,
even with no archetypes. The archetypes layer is not invariant,
and is not meant to be. So, one way of understanding the split is
as between the layers ontology that everyone can agree on as being
constant, and on layers that are diverse and variable.
So, in summary there is (and has to be) some pragmatism in what we are
doing...
hope this helps.
- thomas
-
If you have any questions about using this list,
please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
