A number of problems have surfaced over the last couple of years of
archetype modelling that the tools and sometimes the underlying
formalism do not adequately deal with. Many of these are to do with
being able to control the items within a container attribute, such as
inside SECTIONs, CLUSTERs, and the many other places in the openEHR
reference model where attributes can have multiple members. It has taken
quite some time to understand the problems and come up with an analysis
which deals with them all and tries to propose a solution. I have now
attempted to do this at the page
http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/spec/Ordering+and+choice+in+archetypes+and+templates
I believe this covers a number of problems discovered at the NHS, by
William Goossen's modelling efforts, by people at various university
contexts, and by at various vendors, include Ocean, who wrote the
Archetype Editor tool that is currently most widely used. Improving such
tools, and going to the next generation of tools (including tools that
integrate more directly with Snomed-ct and terminology in general)
requires us to attack these problems and get them fixed.
The page above should help us in dealing with one group of problems that
we know about.
All reactions are welcome - please post feedback either here or as
comments on the wiki page. in particular, authors of any ADL / AOM
tooling of any kind should review this page.
NOTE - if anyone takes into their mind to actually edit the wiki page,
note that the confluence WSIWIG editor is nearly unusable and breaks
easily wherever {} characters are used ({} means 'macro' in their wiki).
We will upgrade at some point and hopefully these problems will go away,
but for now, edit the page directly at your own peril!
- thomas beale
