Op 24-nov-2007, om 7:45 heeft Williamtfgoossen at cs.com het volgende  
geschreven:

> V3 has no various implementations,

Can you, in this light explain what Barry Smith is talking about in  
his HL7-watch blog (http://hl7-watch.blogspot.com/, the text is also  
underneath). Probably I don't understand it correctly, so if you  
could enlighten me that would be very helpful.

I think that we all agree that a good standard should have only one  
implementation



Cheers,

Stef

-------
  The Dialects of RIM

The latest Minutes of Evidence of the House of Commons Select  
Committee on Health, on the UK National Programme for IT, contain  
this comment from Richard Granger:

     In terms of the core Spine infrastructure, there was some  
mythology in the Health Informatics Community that the standards  
existed, HL7 was mature, and so forth. That was completely untrue.

Dr Granger goes on:

     We have had to put an awful lot of effort into specifying the  
standards for messages, around demographics, around booking, around  
prescriptions, and then the software that BT have built with a number  
of sub-contractors is brand new software that has been custom-built  
for the NHS; so that is high-risk, new build software. There was no  
other way of doing it. I am very pleased a number of other  
jurisdictions are getting very interested in using that.

He thereby inadvertently touches on another issue currently causing  
concern in HL7 circles. The HL7 Reference Information Model or 'RIM'  
was, we will remember, introduced as the solution to the problems  
created by the appearance of multiple dialects in earlier versions of  
the HL7 standard. HL7 would prevent the appearance of dialect  
versions by enforcing conformity to the RIM. Now, however, it is  
becoming increasingly clear that the RIM itself exists in multiple  
dialects.

This is more than just a problem of successive, incremental  
improvements. As the RIM Document Editorial Assessment from 8 June  
2007 points out:

     ... the 2006 Normative Edition contains a RIM document based on  
the last balloted RIM [from 2003]: this gap creates the opportunity  
for conceptual conflict between the document and current practice. A  
reader must choose between a normative edition of the RIM published  
for ANSI, which contains nothing extraneous but is out of date; an  
extract of the current RIM as maintained by MnM, which will be the  
most up-to-date, but which is not readily available to the membership  
at large; or, which is most probable, the RIM document published in  
the Normative Edition, which both contains extraneous information and  
is out of date.

It seems, in fact, that we have at least:

1. the version of the RIM adopted by ISO as an international standard

2. the balloted RIM document that describes those parts of the RIM  
designated as 'normative', the latest (and still current) version of  
which, it seems, dates back to June 2003

3. an ANSI publication based on 2.

4. a CEN Standard EN 14822-1:2005 Health informatics - General  
purpose information components - Part 1: Overview (see also CEN  
Standard EN 14720-1:2005), based on 3.

5. the 'living' RIM UML model (regularly updated through  
harmonization) as it exists at any given stage. This RIM contains  
content that existed at the time of balloting in 2003 but was not  
then balloted, together with four years worth of cumulated changes.  
Some of this material is, I am told, intended to be balloted in the  
future; some (e.g. in CoreInfrastructure subject area) is not.

6. an idealized 'frozen' version consisting of those parts of 5.  
which have, at any given stage, passed through the process of  
harmonization,

7. the UK rebuild.

As I understand matters (and as always this understanding may be for  
various reasons imperfect) the RIM documentation included in any  
publication of the V3 standard more recent than 2003 should be based  
on the latest working version of the model as maintained by the  
Modeling and Methodology (MnM) committee. The publication label  
?Normative Edition? may cause confusion, however, if it is taken by  
the reader as suggesting that the contents so labeled are all  
normative (though this issue should be addressed in the relevant  
document preface).
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