Hi Fred, Thanks for coming along here. It has been an interesting discussion. I just wanted to pick up on one point you made ..
"In my view once data is being exchanged on a massive scale, the political tensions that the absence of "true meaning" creates will quickly lead to the resolution of these types of problems." Whilst I agree that you need to take one step at a time and get simple connectivity going first, our experience from the UK is that once this is established, the small trickle of demand for semantics grows very quickly. In the absence of some kind of agile mechanism/ framework to meet this demand and quickly reconcile differences across very different communities and specific use cases, projects and vendors just resort to doing their own thing. So in the UK, in spite of full connectivity, adherence to syntactic standards, and some local successes with semantic exchange, we have at least 8 different semantically incompatible expressions of 'GP Medication' having to be dealt with by producers/consumers of messages. Getting this right is extremely difficult but I believe the 'archetype' approach of openEHR/ CIMI and tools like CKM, are the only realistic way of getting a handle on this. This has much in common with the PCAST idea of 'molecules' - see Wes Rishel's excellent summary http://blogs.gartner.com/wes_rishel/2011/02/13/pcast-documents-vs-atomic-data-elements/ Regards, Ian Dr Ian McNicoll office +44 (0)1536 414 994 fax +44 (0)1536 516317 mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859 skype ianmcnicoll ian.mcnicoll at oceaninformatics.com Clinical Modelling Consultant,?Ocean Informatics, UK Director/Clinical Knowledge Editor openEHR Foundation ?www.openehr.org/knowledge Honorary Senior Research Associate, CHIME, UCL SCIMP Working Group, NHS Scotland BCS Primary Health Care ?www.phcsg.org On 18 February 2012 20:55, fred trotter <fred.trotter at gmail.com> wrote: > > >> >> (please, no flame wars, below I am just trying to explain _my_ point of >> view to Fred;-) >> > > There is no need to worry about a flame war. I am certainly dubious, but I > take what you guys are doing and saying very seriously. > It seems like you are taking a totally different approach to semantic > interoperability than I generally favor. > > My view is that semantic interoperability is simply a problem we do not have > yet. It is the problem that we get after we have interoperability of any > kind. This is why I focus on things like the Direct Project > (http://directproject.org) which solve only the connectivity issues. In my > view once data is being exchanged on a massive scale, the political tensions > that the absence of "true meaning" creates will quickly lead to the > resolution of these types of problems. > > The OpenEHR notion, on the other hand, is to create a core substrate within > the EHR design itself which facilitates interoperability automatically. (is > that right? I am trying to digest what you are saying here). Trying to solve > the same problem on the "front side" as it were. > > Given that there is no way to tell which approach is right, there is no > reason why I should be biased against OpenEHR, which is taking an approach > that others generally are not. > > If that is the right core value proposition (and for God's sake tell me now > if I am getting this wrong) then I can re-write the OpenEHR accordingly. > > Regards, > -FT > > -- > Fred Trotter > http://www.fredtrotter.com > > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-technical mailing list > openEHR-technical at openehr.org > http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical >
