Hi Thomas, I'm surprised that at this advanced stage of openEHR's maturity you'd still have to defend concepts like these, which are self-evident. Your architecture, or something closely resembling it, is actually the only path to (1) computability, (2) shareability, and (3) coherent and maintainable program code. Ultimately the real enemy is chaos, and that's precisely what you get unless someone detects and names the universal patterns amidst the diversity, and structures program code to conform to such patterns. I'm not clear why this should be controversial.
This discussion is now dividing into two unrelated branches: (1) the desirability of consensus around the content of data model, and (2) whether the model itself, whether widely agreed to or not, should embody a multi-level abstraction hierarchy permitting code and logic reuse at its more abstract levels. Both branches, wrongly argued, are a direct invitation to chaos. From what I understand of it, openEHR is an attempt, in both regards, to avoid chaos. I can only wish you success against the two challenges. Randy On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Thomas Beale < thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: > On 07/04/2013 12:11, Grahame Grieve wrote: > > Hi Tom > > You ask: > > > Is there a better meta-architecture available? > When actually the question at hand appears to be: is it even worth > having one? > > I don't think that this is a question with a technical answer. It's a > question of what you are trying to achieve. I've written about this here: > http://www.healthintersections.com.au/?p=820 > > > There is always a meta-architecture. It's just a question of whether > system builders are conscious of it. If they aren't, then by definition > they are just doing *ad hoc* development, with no comprehension of the > semantics of what they build. > > I prefer to have conscious design going on, and make some attempts at > defining rules for system semantics. Then you know what you can expect the > system to do or not. > > To go back to the question of meta-architecture, let me ask the following > questions... > > 1. is it worth trying to have a publicly agreed (by some community at > least) information model? I.e. to at least be able to share a 'Quantity', a > data tree of some kind, a 'clinical statement' and so on? > => in my view yes. Therefore, define and publish some information > model. Aka 'reference model' in openEHR. > > 2. do we really want to redefine the 'serum sodium', 'heartrate' and > 'primary diagnosis' data points every time we define some clinical data set? > => in my view no. Therefore, provide a way to define a library of > re-usable domain data points and data groups (openEHR version of this: > archetypes) > > 3. do we need a way to define data sets specific to use cases, e.g., the > contents of messages, documents etc etc? > => in my view, yes, it seems obvious. Therefore, provide a way to > define such data sets, using the library of 'standard data points/groups', > and also the reference model. > > and > > 4. would we like a way of querying the data based on the library of > re-usable data items? E.g. is it reasonable to expect to query for 'blood > sugar' across data-sets created by different applications & sources? > => in my view yes. To fail on this is not to be able to use the data > except in some *ad hoc *brute force sense. > > > You (I don't mean Grahame, I mean anyone ;-) may answer differently, but > if you don't care about these questions, it means you have a fundamentally > different view about how to deal with information in complex domains > requiring information sharing, computation, and ultimately intelligent > analysis (health is just one such domain). Either you think that the above > is a 'nice idea' but unachievable, or else that it's irrelevant to real > needs, or.. something else. > > If you think the questions are relevant but have different answers to > them, it means you believe in a different meta-architecture. > > Note that these considerations are actually orthogonal to whether > standards should be built by agreeing only on messages between systems, or > how systems are built (the topic of Grahame's blog post). > > - thomas > > > > > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-technical mailing list > openEHR-technical at lists.openehr.org > > http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/pipermail/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20130407/aa20c86d/attachment.html>
