Hi all, Given this discussion on ISO 21090 I would like to bring forward the following:
1. Every international standard is and has to be based on political decisions: all member countries have to be accepting it and hence will want to get something specific out of it, or block too difficult parts. That is the way of standards making, in contrary to what a group of friends like in OpenEHR foundation can do. This has nothing to do with committees working in the implementation space or sitting at a table. It is how formal democratic voting goes. Not a perfect system we know, but apparently chosen above totalitarian approaches. This democratic development (inclusive of all parties concerned, and voting by members) has been and is still the case for ISO 21090. The same democratic and transparant voting procedure by members is used in HL7 international (of course the membership is organised different from ISO). 2. The use cases for ISO 21090 do come from different sources: an older basic data type standard from ISO, clinical use cases, CEN standards, in particular the one on archetypes (13606-2), AND HL7 among others. The resulting set is accepted by the ISO membership, and indeed the HL7 membership, referring to it as datatypes R2 (and facing an enourmous piece of effort and work to redo a lot of the models and messages due to the harmonisation). And under the JIC, also the CDISC organisation deals with this since ISO 21090 is part of the joint harmonisation work. I think the willingness of the different JIC partners to step beyond their traditional route and harmonise this formidable and fundamental work is the most important achievement in the last 25 years of international standards work. I would like to compliment Grahame in particular that he managed to get a useful, albeit say 96% "perfect" standard out of this. 3. No standard or specification can be perfect. In particular, Tom's work might be closer to perfection than the ISO 21090, but that is hypothetically a matter of a percentage between 96% and 97.5% on a VAS of 0 - 100%. I personally are pragmatic, I need in Detailed Clinical Models and in HL7 v3 Care Provision message implementations about 20 - 30% of the ISO 21090, so do not bother about the rare use cases addressed. 4. Core principle behind the standard is that you create a profile around it that allows you to implement it in your system, or your message, or your datawarehouse or whatever. There is usually no way to have it 100% ready for use. The example from the blog that Tom talks about, where ISO 21090 is mapped into their own CDISC models is almost perfect. That is the way to go. Yes it will include mappings from ISO time format to XML time format. But if that works well on implementation, at the exchange level you are compliant. 5. If you adhere to ISO 21090 / conform to it / there is always the option to limit your implementation set. E.g. refer to particular chapters or codes in ISO 21090. 6. It looks from Tom's objections that OpenEHR cannot adhere to data type standard ISO 21090. Is that a problem in the OpenEHR specifications, or is that a problem on political level: we do want to invent our own because it is closer to perfection? What I mean here is: if I create archetypes in OpenEHR spaces (there are about 25 in Dutch available pending other issues to be solved before releasing). And from this system I need to exchange HL7 v3 messages in the Dutch national switshboard space, will I be in trouble because the OpenEHR archetypes cannot handle even the basic ISO 21090 datatypes? Met vriendelijke groet, Results 4 Care b.v. dr. William TF Goossen directeur De Stinse 15 3823 VM Amersfoort email: wgoossen at results4care.nl telefoon +31 (0)654614458 fax +31 (0)33 2570169 Kamer van Koophandel nummer: 32133713 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20101119/8669876d/attachment.html>
