Ian, I agree with your comments. The thing I noted that is to do with the previous discussion on HL7's 'subtractive modelling' approach:
> With respect to how the RIM represents marital status, first we note > that HL7 places most demographic information as "attributes" (in HL7 > lingo) of two classes: LivingSubject and Person. Note that the latter > specializes the former. > > LivingSubject "attributes" > administrativeGenderCode > birthTime > deceasedInd > deceasedTime > Person "attributes" > raceCode > ethnicGroupCode > maritalStatusCode > > So, marital status is an "attribute" of the Person class. Note that > the Person class, per the RIM, may be used to represent a group of > people as well as a single person. What the marital status of a group > of people might represent is not clear. > Specifically the last sentence above: the Person class is wrongly named (presumably it should be 'Subject'), and it contains 3 attributes that don't apply to some/many of its instances (none apply in general to family as a subject for example, and maritalStatus does not usefully apply to children or infants and would never be recorded for them). It is a case of too much stuff being put in, trying to cope with all possible forseeable use cases. The latter can never be achieved, so by definition this approach to modelling won't work in the long run. - thomas On 25/11/2010 11:35, Ian McNicoll wrote: > Hi Thomas, > > I am not sure that the particular difficulties highlighted in this > piece are really the sole province of HL7. As I read the original > discussions and Barry Smith's analysis, there are 2 separate issues > > 1) The overall difficulties of harmonising value sets for particular > use cases (HITSP in this example). Whilst I think we can argue that > the archetype and maximal dataset approach make this task much easier, > nevertheless the organisational and legacy representation issues > mentioned are identical for our modelling work. > > 2) Barry Smith takes issue with the ontological definition of 'marital > status'. Whilst his logic may be impeccable, I think this is an > unfortunate example to pick apart. I am not sure if his preferred > higher-level marital status 'married/not married' is of any real > practical clinical or administrative value. Does he mean legally > married or effectively married or religiously married? By whose rules? > I think this is taking ontological purity into an unsustainable and > fruitless level of detail. > * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20101125/c47f17f7/attachment.html>
