GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Hi all, As some of you know I am interested in XForms and would love to be part of this community effort if and when it starts. Currently I am co-supervising two thesis students working on a project the uses XForms, Grails, and IBM DB2 similar to this http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xformsruby1/index.html (but Grails instead of Rails). The goal of the project is to have a generic form-based documentation framework for medical data. Obviously in the longterm I have openEHR data in mind. I don't think we will get as far as auto-generating XForms GUIs for openEHR data, but I hope we can hand-code a XForms GUI for the chronic wound use case I have been building several archetypes and one template for. To speed up the XForms hand-coding I plan to use the IBM XForms Generator (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xfg) to scaffold an initial form, which obviously needs to be customised a lot to respresent as many of the archetype and template constraints as possible. After submission of the instance it will be additionally checked against the whole template data schema (TDS) on the server-side. I did a first test of this generator. For more details look on the wiki: http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/dev/IBM+XForms+Generator+Test Cheers, Thilo On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Heath Frankel heath.frankel at oceaninformatics.com wrote: Hi Thilo, It is interesting you have talked about the idea of scaffolding a GUI. This is exactly the work Ocean is doing at present. We have redeveloped our Web Forms engine to work based on this principle. From a template developed using the Ocean template Designer, we now generate a Form Definition file based on that template using a basic (and modifiable) presentation transformation. This assumes nothing about layout and only specifies the existence of controls within groups and incorporate the AOM constraints for the corresponding data bound object from the reference model. This gives forms engine all the information it needs to generate a basic form at runtime straight from a template. The advantage of having this form definition over simply creating a form straight from the template/archetype as demonstrated by Greg is that we can use the same artefact to customise the layout of the form using an editor. The forms engine can then process both designed (after initial scaffolding) and auto-generated forms as required. The Forms Definition format we are currently using is proprietary, but I would be interested give some time and reason to see how we can import/export into a standard format such as XForms. However, I am sceptical about the use of XForms unless we utilise extensions significantly otherwise we lose way too much information available in the AOM constraints. Heath
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
See short note inline On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Erik Sundvall erisu at imt.liu.se wrote: Hi! Thanks for a lot of interesting response regarding GUI-hints and other things. Please excuse a little left-to-right analogy below: There seems too be a scale or spectrum of detail level and use case specificity going from... Left: purely semantic (maximum data set) models = archetypes ...via the nearby... openEHR templates (still purely semantic if we skip the hide_in_ui to keep the template artifacts) ...further far away to... Right: actual GUI in an implemented system with specific widgets positioning etc Currently openEHR specifications describe artifacts at the left side of the spectrum. This discussion has interestingly been broadened further to the right than I was thinking of in my initial questions. If we look at a tool like the Template Designer from Ocean Informatics there is an immediate jump from templates (close to the left) to detailed GUI layout (far right), that jump could be divided into more steps (possibly with some steps persisted and reusable) as suggested by some in this discussion. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:03, Hugh Leslie hugh.leslie at oceaninformatics.com wrote: I don't think that templates should contain GUI rendering hints as they should remain purely about the semantics. ... Personally, I think that there should be some other artifact that details GUI specs - if we mix up the two things, then the purpose of the template becomes confused. Templates can be used for everything from GUI, to data instance, persistance and query. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:57, Andrew Patterson andrewpatto at gmail.com wrote: I agree with Hugh - I would push back very strongly on the concept of UI hints in the template definitions. On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 00:18, Thomas Beale thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com wrote: *I think it will be one tool that writes two artefacts, one of which is GUI 'hints'. These comments seem very reasonable, could we then conclude that the hide_in_ui and similar GUI-hints should not be in the template spec and that we instead can continue discussion regarding other artifacts with GUI-related information that might be reusable between implementations. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:57, Andrew Patterson andrewpatto at gmail.com wrote: I'd make the point that everyone always thinks that given enough hints computers will be able to intelligently lay out interface components (not just in openehr world - I have seen this in many UI projects). Invariably, the autogenerated interfaces are the exception rather than the rule - by that, I mean that the autogenerated interfaces can be made useful but most real users end up preferring an interface layout designed explicitly by a human being. I agree (except to everyone always). In most cases explicitly layouted interfaces will be preferred, due to aesthetics, optimal use of screen real estate etc. That's why I wrote automated or _semi-automated_ design. Consider a use case where you at a national level want to standardize parts of the information capture in for example yearly diabetes check-up visits in primary care in order to do statistics, data mining etc. Also consider that a couple of parts will be added or modified on approximately a yearly basis to improve the follow up process and incorporate new treatments etc. Add to this that you have five openEHR compliant vendors with hundreds of separate system installations across the nation. The openEHR approach with archetypes and templates facilitate the semantic parts of the above scenario very well and the yearly updates of archetypes and templates can be loaded into the (purely semantic part) system more or less with the push of a button. But what happens on the GUI side of things? Will that always have to wait for manual layout before the new archetypes and templates can start to be used in clinical practice? How fast will that happen? Some vendors and customers will certainly have the resources to swiftly incorporate the changes but many others will experience considerable delay and would in the meantime have to resort to either keep using the old forms and semantics (thus loosing ability to capture data using the new national standars) or use general GUIs based on templates only (probably not so nice and efficient - driving clinicians crazy). Maybe this was just a way of restating Sebastians comment... On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 11:30, Sebastian Garde wrote: in my opinion it is i) important to have some form of GUI layout descriptions that really enable smart GUI generation in the long run. If not, the whole automatic process stops just before the GUI, which is not really the best we can do in the long run I think. When manually designing the GUIs, the designers (from every vendor) need to capture the user requirements in discussions with users, this is often done in several
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
The advantage of deriving generic user interfaces only from data instances and the underlying archetypes (without knowing the template) is the possibility to edit unknown openEHR data, although the GUI would be simple. Thus, I agree with Chunlan on the position of a generic GUIs on Erik's spectrum. -Thilo On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 2:14 AM, Chunlan Ma chunlan.ma at oceaninformatics.com wrote: The Generic User Interfaces, i.e. the GUI_hints that are a bit more towards the left side of the spectrum described by Eric Sundvall, would be archetype specific rather than template specific. I personally think these generic GUI-hints should be processed by a generic form engine that understands archetypes only. For example, if tobacco use status value is Never used, which is local coded text in the substance_use archetype, the Method cluster can be hidden from the form. This generic GUI_hint can be applied to all templates or user interfaces. A more specific form engine is required for context specific user interfaces. Cheers, Chunlan From: openehr-technical-bounces at openehr.org [mailto:openehr-technical-bounces at openehr.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Freriks Sent: Monday, June 30, 2008 11:32 PM To: erisu at imt.liu.se; For openEHR technical discussions Subject: Re: GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts)) My spectrum: - Archetypes (generic documentation patterns) - Templates (context dependent documentation patterns) - Generic User Interfaces (generic presentation patterns) - User Interface (context dependent presentation patterns) Gerard -- private -- Gerard Freriks, MD Huigsloterdijk 378 2158 LR Buitenkaag The Netherlands T: +31 252544896 M: +31 620347088 E: gfrer at luna.nl Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin 11 Nov 1755 On Jun 30, 2008, at 3:19 PM, Erik Sundvall wrote: Hi! Thanks for a lot of interesting response regarding GUI-hints and other things. Please excuse a little left-to-right analogy below: There seems too be a scale or spectrum of detail level and use case specificity going from... Left: purely semantic (maximum data set) models = archetypes ...via the nearby... openEHR templates (still purely semantic if we skip the hide_in_ui to keep the template artifacts) ...further far away to... Right: actual GUI in an implemented system with specific widgets positioning etc Currently openEHR specifications describe artifacts at the left side of the spectrum. This discussion has interestingly been broadened further to the right than I was thinking of in my initial questions. If we look at a tool like the Template Designer from Ocean Informatics there is an immediate jump from templates (close to the left) to detailed GUI layout (far right), that jump could be divided into more steps (possibly with some steps persisted and reusable) as suggested by some in this discussion. ___ openEHR-technical mailing list openEHR-technical at openehr.org http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Erik Sundvall wrote: I obviously did not explain clearly what I meant by GUI-hints. What I was thinking of was a bit more towards the left side of the spectrum trying to capture some some of the semantics of the human-computer-interaction when entering the things described by templates. I was not thinking of colors, fonts, detailed component placement etc. Instead I'm thinking of things like: - Greg's suggestion that one could specify whether a text node in a template will likely be short (e.g. a name) or if it is more likely to be a paragraph that would benefit from a multiline-type of text entry widget. - In a long template that also includes a section about tobacco use you might want to specify that the detailed parts regarding amount of consumption don't need to be shown if the person has been documented with the status Never used. (I.e. implemented using simple conditional statements). - In the a particular use case in mind you might want to assign the the subtree Consumption, Amount of substance a higher priority in GUIs than the Previous attempts to quit smoking subtree so that the latter gets pushed to a normally hidden collapsed/hidden subform if there is a lack of space. (I.e. using a detail level mechanism) - Mechanisms like hide_in_ui to skip intermediate things that are meaningful in information modelling but are distracting or unnecessary in a GUI. most of the above are part of the CUI design ideas in the NHS, and I agree, are more 'semantic'. I think of them as 'workflow' semantics, rather than data semantics. They are a logical concept that could be implemented in presentation in more than one way. The conditionality idea (Erik's 2nd point above) is included in the new template / specialised archetype specification. Some things like the priority have not yet been considered (even by the CUI group) but probably need to be. As you can see these things have a bit of a semantic touch also, but maybe a different kind of semantics than we usually refer to as semantics in this community. When it comes to template design it would be interesting to know if the clinicians always are comfortable only having the on/off (set zero occurrence) of templates (or are there more restrictions available)? Don't you get a lot of it depends-answers whether to include something in a template or not? Do you believe that answers what to kill from (for the use case) overly detailed archetypes templates would be different if the clinicians are aware of the possibilities to change priorities, set conditional statements etc? hence the need to add conditionality to the template spec;-) I don't suggest that these hints necessarily should be created simultaneously with the template editing, but I guess that the very same clinical experts that design the template would be also good candidates to give some GUI-hints after the template creation. Thoughts? When it comes to what I call GUI-hints above I believe it would be useful to specify a model (like the with the AM) and one or many serialization formats of it rather than going straight for a markup language. some of these hints will be covered by the new specialised archetype / template model. but some are not yet. I wonder if we can construct a definitive list? Artifacts built using that model could then be used for auto generation of GUIs (whenever that is necessary) and as input to other steps specifying things more to the right in the spectrum like dealing with specific widgets, component positioning etc. for example I think this is true as well... One last thing... On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 00:18, Thomas Beale thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com wrote: ... there are more semantic indicators being built into the template designer, some based on the NHS CUI project, that will provide good hints on GUI generation, including some temporal workflow aspects. Are these things or the principles behind them something you can and would like to like detail a bit more or share with the community when time permits? as far as I know the CUI group's work is not secret; we have been given a list of about 10 things they want to see in a GUI, but I have to admit I have not even checked to see if this is on the relevant website. We need to find that out and make it public if it is not. - thomas beale
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
The Generic User Interfaces, i.e. the GUI_hints that are a bit more towards the left side of the spectrum described by Eric Sundvall, would be archetype specific rather than template specific. I personally think these generic GUI-hints should be processed by a generic form engine that understands archetypes only. For example, if tobacco use status value is Never used, which is local coded text in the substance_use archetype, the Method cluster can be hidden from the form. This generic GUI_hint can be applied to all templates or user interfaces. A more specific form engine is required for context specific user interfaces. Cheers, Chunlan From: openehr-technical-boun...@openehr.org [mailto:openehr-technical-bounces at openehr.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Freriks Sent: Monday, June 30, 2008 11:32 PM To: erisu at imt.liu.se; For openEHR technical discussions Subject: Re: GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts)) My spectrum: - Archetypes (generic documentation patterns) - Templates (context dependent documentation patterns) - Generic User Interfaces (generic presentation patterns) - User Interface (context dependent presentation patterns) Gerard -- private -- Gerard Freriks, MD Huigsloterdijk 378 2158 LR Buitenkaag The Netherlands T: +31 252544896 M: +31 620347088 E: gfrer at luna.nl Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin 11 Nov 1755 On Jun 30, 2008, at 3:19 PM, Erik Sundvall wrote: Hi! Thanks for a lot of interesting response regarding GUI-hints and other things. Please excuse a little left-to-right analogy below: There seems too be a scale or spectrum of detail level and use case specificity going from... Left: purely semantic (maximum data set) models = archetypes ...via the nearby... openEHR templates (still purely semantic if we skip the hide_in_ui to keep the template artifacts) ...further far away to... Right: actual GUI in an implemented system with specific widgets positioning etc Currently openEHR specifications describe artifacts at the left side of the spectrum. This discussion has interestingly been broadened further to the right than I was thinking of in my initial questions. If we look at a tool like the Template Designer from Ocean Informatics there is an immediate jump from templates (close to the left) to detailed GUI layout (far right), that jump could be divided into more steps (possibly with some steps persisted and reusable) as suggested by some in this discussion. -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20080701/1e27b335/attachment.html
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
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GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Hi All, This extension idea is used in XForms in a similar manner. In fact this extension mechanism is actually something that I played with 18 months ago to represent AOM constraints of data associated with each form control expressed in XForms. I shelved this approach due to the complexity of implement this approach. I would be interested in revisiting this again with the aid of the community. However, Rong is proposing the opposite, having form extensions within the template. This could be viable. The other consideration I had when I objected internally to the Hide-on-form attribute provided by the Ocean Template Designer, was to have a separate section within the template for form definition details. This again is borrowed from XForms where it has the multiple sections including the Model (similar to template definition but in an instance form, although you can also reference an XML schema in XForms I believe), and View (form definition). Heath -Original Message- From: openehr-technical-bounces at openehr.org [mailto:openehr-technical- bounces at openehr.org] On Behalf Of Thilo Schuler Sent: Friday, 27 June 2008 10:12 PM To: For openEHR technical discussions Subject: Re: GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts)) Very interesting - maybe we could have seperate namespaces for the core tags and extensions. Could be a good compromise! While I see the advantages of keeping GUI stuff out of the template, I also see that this more and more complicated as we add additional abstraction layers. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:26 PM, Rong Chen rong.acode at gmail.com wrote: Hi all, My thoughts on this is so far our experience with templates are mostly related to screen forms and GUI widgets. It's probably easiest to relate to screens when engage clinicians for templates reviewing, hence the need for visual presentation of templates from the NHS work. We also want to reuse the semantics in templates to generate messages, reports etc. The question is how much 'generic' semantics can be reused from the templates built for specific purpose - screen templates, message templates and report templates. Surely the content for all types of templates will be quite different and we probably would like to have special syntax to support GUI hints, but do we need special syntax to support other uses? How about indicators for decision support, clinical research data and information lifecycle management? I am thinking about an extendable markup language that can be plugged into the core template language as a way to add extensions to templates if there is any application specific meta-data required. I am also in favour of the idea to store these extra meta-data inside the templates to ease the maintenance. When passing these templates around, the template engines can ignore the extended markup and only process the standard part if they don't recognize the extended syntax. Something like gui_markup_plugin hide_in_GUI path=.../ hide_in_GUI path=.../ /gui_markup_plugin Cheers, Rong On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Thilo Schuler thilo.schuler at gmail.com wrote: Would also want GUI things like hide_in_GUI to be in a separate artifact on top of a template. It is good to hear that Ocean only did that as quick fix to meet customers requirements, which is very plausible. As mentioned before templates are great to initially SCAFFOLD a GUI, which has to be further adapted by humans for the best possible usability results (use-case and device specific). This allows verification of the templates and archetypes from a user point of view and is very important as Richard pointed out. I can understand Josinas comments about clinicians not caring about the difference between semantics and GUI stuff, so a tool like the Template Designer should hide this important separation, where appropriate. Thilo On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Hugh Leslie hugh.leslie at oceaninformatics.com wrote: Hi Erik Personally, I don't think that templates should contain GUI rendering hints as they should remain purely about the semantics. There are others that don't agree with me. The hide on form function in the Template designer was partly to meet requirements for documentation of the templates for some groups using this technology. I am not sure if the hide_in_ui parameter is going to make it into the final template spec - Tom will have something to say about that. Personally, I think that there should be some other artifact that details GUI specs - if we mix up the two things, then the purpose of the template becomes confused. Templates can be used for everything from GUI, to data instance, persistance and query. If we add a whole lot of parameters around GUI, then we will also probably need
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Hi Thilo, It is interesting you have talked about the idea of scaffolding a GUI. This is exactly the work Ocean is doing at present. We have redeveloped our Web Forms engine to work based on this principle. From a template developed using the Ocean template Designer, we now generate a Form Definition file based on that template using a basic (and modifiable) presentation transformation. This assumes nothing about layout and only specifies the existence of controls within groups and incorporate the AOM constraints for the corresponding data bound object from the reference model. This gives forms engine all the information it needs to generate a basic form at runtime straight from a template. The advantage of having this form definition over simply creating a form straight from the template/archetype as demonstrated by Greg is that we can use the same artefact to customise the layout of the form using an editor. The forms engine can then process both designed (after initial scaffolding) and auto-generated forms as required. The Forms Definition format we are currently using is proprietary, but I would be interested give some time and reason to see how we can import/export into a standard format such as XForms. However, I am sceptical about the use of XForms unless we utilise extensions significantly otherwise we lose way too much information available in the AOM constraints. Heath -Original Message- From: openehr-technical-bounces at openehr.org [mailto:openehr-technical- bounces at openehr.org] On Behalf Of Thilo Schuler Sent: Friday, 27 June 2008 8:00 PM To: For openEHR technical discussions Subject: Re: GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts)) Would also want GUI things like hide_in_GUI to be in a separate artifact on top of a template. It is good to hear that Ocean only did that as quick fix to meet customers requirements, which is very plausible. As mentioned before templates are great to initially SCAFFOLD a GUI, which has to be further adapted by humans for the best possible usability results (use-case and device specific). This allows verification of the templates and archetypes from a user point of view and is very important as Richard pointed out. I can understand Josinas comments about clinicians not caring about the difference between semantics and GUI stuff, so a tool like the Template Designer should hide this important separation, where appropriate. Thilo On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Hugh Leslie hugh.leslie at oceaninformatics.com wrote: Hi Erik Personally, I don't think that templates should contain GUI rendering hints as they should remain purely about the semantics. There are others that don't agree with me. The hide on form function in the Template designer was partly to meet requirements for documentation of the templates for some groups using this technology. I am not sure if the hide_in_ui parameter is going to make it into the final template spec - Tom will have something to say about that. Personally, I think that there should be some other artifact that details GUI specs - if we mix up the two things, then the purpose of the template becomes confused. Templates can be used for everything from GUI, to data instance, persistance and query. If we add a whole lot of parameters around GUI, then we will also probably need to add specific things for these other uses and it might get very messy. regards Hugh Erik Sundvall wrote: Hi! On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: Thanks to the java reference implementation I have a demo of importing archetypes to auto generate forms which have the references to the archetype. Nice. Keep up the good work. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: One thing I noticed in the conversion that I don't have any way of distinguishing between a line of text and multiline text in the archetype (I would generate an appropriate pane in the latter case). Perhaps not a big deal. This might be a useful requirement for the current template specification currently being worked on, or possibly a new kind of related specification. I first thought that templates so far had been considered as purely specifying semantics and that they were not supposed to give hints regarding GUI rendering. But now I see a parameter hide_in_ui in the class T_COMPLEX_OBJECT found in the draft template specification. (A similar function is present in the Template Designer tool from Ocean Informatics there is an option to hide elements instead of constraining them to zero occurrence, in the output file this is persisted as hide_on_form=true.) Could anybody detail it's intended use a bit more? I think GUI rendering hints can be appropriate to specify at the same point in time as template design is taking
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Hi! Thanks for a lot of interesting response regarding GUI-hints and other things. Please excuse a little left-to-right analogy below: There seems too be a scale or spectrum of detail level and use case specificity going from... Left: purely semantic (maximum data set) models = archetypes ...via the nearby... openEHR templates (still purely semantic if we skip the hide_in_ui to keep the template artifacts) ...further far away to... Right: actual GUI in an implemented system with specific widgets positioning etc Currently openEHR specifications describe artifacts at the left side of the spectrum. This discussion has interestingly been broadened further to the right than I was thinking of in my initial questions. If we look at a tool like the Template Designer from Ocean Informatics there is an immediate jump from templates (close to the left) to detailed GUI layout (far right), that jump could be divided into more steps (possibly with some steps persisted and reusable) as suggested by some in this discussion. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:03, Hugh Leslie hugh.leslie at oceaninformatics.com wrote: I don't think that templates should contain GUI rendering hints as they should remain purely about the semantics. ... Personally, I think that there should be some other artifact that details GUI specs - if we mix up the two things, then the purpose of the template becomes confused. Templates can be used for everything from GUI, to data instance, persistance and query. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:57, Andrew Patterson andrewpatto at gmail.com wrote: I agree with Hugh - I would push back very strongly on the concept of UI hints in the template definitions. On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 00:18, Thomas Beale thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com wrote: *I think it will be one tool that writes two artefacts, one of which is GUI 'hints'. These comments seem very reasonable, could we then conclude that the hide_in_ui and similar GUI-hints should not be in the template spec and that we instead can continue discussion regarding other artifacts with GUI-related information that might be reusable between implementations. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:57, Andrew Patterson andrewpatto at gmail.com wrote: I'd make the point that everyone always thinks that given enough hints computers will be able to intelligently lay out interface components (not just in openehr world - I have seen this in many UI projects). Invariably, the autogenerated interfaces are the exception rather than the rule - by that, I mean that the autogenerated interfaces can be made useful but most real users end up preferring an interface layout designed explicitly by a human being. I agree (except to everyone always). In most cases explicitly layouted interfaces will be preferred, due to aesthetics, optimal use of screen real estate etc. That's why I wrote automated or _semi-automated_ design. Consider a use case where you at a national level want to standardize parts of the information capture in for example yearly diabetes check-up visits in primary care in order to do statistics, data mining etc. Also consider that a couple of parts will be added or modified on approximately a yearly basis to improve the follow up process and incorporate new treatments etc. Add to this that you have five openEHR compliant vendors with hundreds of separate system installations across the nation. The openEHR approach with archetypes and templates facilitate the semantic parts of the above scenario very well and the yearly updates of archetypes and templates can be loaded into the (purely semantic part) system more or less with the push of a button. But what happens on the GUI side of things? Will that always have to wait for manual layout before the new archetypes and templates can start to be used in clinical practice? How fast will that happen? Some vendors and customers will certainly have the resources to swiftly incorporate the changes but many others will experience considerable delay and would in the meantime have to resort to either keep using the old forms and semantics (thus loosing ability to capture data using the new national standars) or use general GUIs based on templates only (probably not so nice and efficient - driving clinicians crazy). Maybe this was just a way of restating Sebastians comment... On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 11:30, Sebastian Garde wrote: in my opinion it is i) important to have some form of GUI layout descriptions that really enable smart GUI generation in the long run. If not, the whole automatic process stops just before the GUI, which is not really the best we can do in the long run I think. When manually designing the GUIs, the designers (from every vendor) need to capture the user requirements in discussions with users, this is often done in several iterations of discussion and redesign. If we could capture at least some the common clinical GUI-related requirements in a machine readable form at an early stage we
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
My spectrum: - Archetypes (generic documentation patterns) - Templates (context dependent documentation patterns) - Generic User Interfaces (generic presentation patterns) - User Interface (context dependent presentation patterns) Gerard -- private -- Gerard Freriks, MD Huigsloterdijk 378 2158 LR Buitenkaag The Netherlands T: +31 252544896 M: +31 620347088 E: gfrer at luna.nl Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin 11 Nov 1755 On Jun 30, 2008, at 3:19 PM, Erik Sundvall wrote: Hi! Thanks for a lot of interesting response regarding GUI-hints and other things. Please excuse a little left-to-right analogy below: There seems too be a scale or spectrum of detail level and use case specificity going from... Left: purely semantic (maximum data set) models = archetypes ...via the nearby... openEHR templates (still purely semantic if we skip the hide_in_ui to keep the template artifacts) ...further far away to... Right: actual GUI in an implemented system with specific widgets positioning etc Currently openEHR specifications describe artifacts at the left side of the spectrum. This discussion has interestingly been broadened further to the right than I was thinking of in my initial questions. If we look at a tool like the Template Designer from Ocean Informatics there is an immediate jump from templates (close to the left) to detailed GUI layout (far right), that jump could be divided into more steps (possibly with some steps persisted and reusable) as suggested by some in this discussion. -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20080630/6c380501/attachment.html
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Is it true that there are two types of templates: generic ones like 'lab request' (which contains a combination of several archetypes), and a further constrained version for local usage? If so, this might mean that clinicians that are trained in openEHR could design the first kind of templates (like Heather Leslie proposed); while 'local' clinicians will decide in (I believe, but correct me if I'm wrong: preferably) one and the same session about the local template and UI features. Or, are templates generally speaking too specific to local practice (so that each template has to be designed locally) to make the above distinction? Josina Gerard Freriks schreef: My spectrum: - Archetypes (generic documentation patterns) - Templates (context dependent documentation patterns) - Generic User Interfaces (generic presentation patterns) - User Interface (context dependent presentation patterns) Gerard -- private -- Gerard Freriks, MD Huigsloterdijk 378 2158 LR Buitenkaag The Netherlands T: +31 252544896 M: +31 620347088 E: gfrer at luna.nl mailto:gfrer at luna.nl Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin 11 Nov 1755 On Jun 30, 2008, at 3:19 PM, Erik Sundvall wrote: Hi! Thanks for a lot of interesting response regarding GUI-hints and other things. Please excuse a little left-to-right analogy below: There seems too be a scale or spectrum of detail level and use case specificity going from... Left: purely semantic (maximum data set) models = archetypes ...via the nearby... openEHR templates (still purely semantic if we skip the hide_in_ui to keep the template artifacts) ...further far away to... Right: actual GUI in an implemented system with specific widgets positioning etc Currently openEHR specifications describe artifacts at the left side of the spectrum. This discussion has interestingly been broadened further to the right than I was thinking of in my initial questions. If we look at a tool like the Template Designer from Ocean Informatics there is an immediate jump from templates (close to the left) to detailed GUI layout (far right), that jump could be divided into more steps (possibly with some steps persisted and reusable) as suggested by some in this discussion. ___ openEHR-technical mailing list openEHR-technical at openehr.org http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
J.P. Freriks wrote: Or, another tool could be designed for GUI design. The clinicians will work with this tool, after which Template designers distil the semantics for the templates. *I think it will be one tool that writes two artefacts, one of which is GUI 'hints'. However, there are more semantic indicators being built into the template designer, some based on the NHS CUI project, that will provide good hints on GUI generation, including some temporal workflow aspects. - thomas beale *
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
I am with you on that layers are important and keep the approach more simple in the long time. As Heather pointed out, we have to be very careful not to distract the clinicians with GUI fluff from clean modelling. But for review and testing there is no doubt, that a real GUI is of value. At the moment the Ocean Template Desinger does both using the one tool, two artefacts approach, and as Thomas wrote it will become better based on the NHS CUI project. The one tool, two artefacts approach is good as it lets clinicians build and adapt runnable GUIs from their authored templates, but also shows that there can be many possible GUIs created from one template. Having a set of core template tags and several extensions (for GUI/message/... hints) is more a technical design choice for better manageability and doesn't interfere with the layers (separation is done via namespaces). Templates are mostly local artefacts and GUIs even more so. So, as Rong said, theses markup-extensions will only be there to ease local implementation. E.g. Ocean could have used such an extension to create the previously mentioned Hide_in_GUI-Hint in a clean way separated from the core template model. Regarding Greg's comment on problems with the visibility of a certain field: IMHO openEHR should not try to standardise GUIs (meaning sharing GUI hints or presentation artefacts). This is a huge task and we have enough problems solving what we are working on right now. But I can picture a system that scaffolds a basic editable GUI based on unknown openEHR data (provided it has access to the underlying archetypes). This scaffolded view could then be adapted by the local user, and the next time this user tries to access similar openEHR data (meaning same archetypes in the same structure/order) the local system remembers it and the customised view is used to display and edit the data. Customisation could even go as far as choosing certain GUI components (per archetype or per aggregated archetypes) from a (shared!) library... But this is still all implementation specific and not part of the openEHR specs. Cheers, Thilo On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:46 PM, Tim Cook timothywayne.cook at gmail.com wrote: On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 14:42 +0200, Thilo Schuler wrote: Very interesting - maybe we could have seperate namespaces for the core tags and extensions. Could be a good compromise! While I see the advantages of keeping GUI stuff out of the template, I also see that this more and more complicated as we add additional abstraction layers. Ahhh, true. It is complicated. It is the reason why health informatics is where it is today. The beauty of the openEHR specs is that each portion does one thing well and yet all the parts fit together. If we get carried away and start mixing the layers then the specs get more complex, the tools more difficult to use, applications less likely to inter-operate and there won't be very many implementations. sarcasm If you aren't careful you could end up with something HL7v3. /sarcasm As my buddy Albert E. said; Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler. ;-) --Tim -- Timothy Cook, MSc Health Informatics Research Development Services LinkedIn Profile:http://www.linkedin.com/in/timothywaynecook Skype ID == timothy.cook ** *You may get my Public GPG key from popular keyservers or * *from this link http://timothywayne.cook.googlepages.com/home* ** ___ openEHR-technical mailing list openEHR-technical at openehr.org http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
On Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:46:27 -0300 Tim Cook timothywayne.cook at gmail.com wrote: On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 14:42 +0200, Thilo Schuler wrote: Very interesting - maybe we could have seperate namespaces for the core tags and extensions. Could be a good compromise! While I see the advantages of keeping GUI stuff out of the template, I also see that this more and more complicated as we add additional abstraction layers. Ahhh, true. It is complicated. It is the reason why health informatics is where it is today. The beauty of the openEHR specs is that each portion does one thing well and yet all the parts fit together. If we get carried away and start mixing the layers then the specs get more complex, the tools more difficult to use, applications less likely to inter-operate and there won't be very many implementations. sarcasm If you aren't careful you could end up with something HL7v3. /sarcasm As my buddy Albert E. said; Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler. ;-) --Tim As counsel for a trade group many years ago, I watched a committee work long, earnestly, and hard to develop a proposal for a standardized set of paper forms for claim notices. When that committee subsequently was asked to review the adequacy of a set of draft EDIFACT messages to communicate the same information content, they had a very difficult time separating the information from its presentation. They were neither stupid nor uncommitted to the effort; their input was both indispensable to success and immediately useful for the developers. But for them, IT was something of a single cloud. It took a while for them to distinguish between the separate problems of (a) signing off on inter-company data sufficiency and (b) implementing and presenting that data on their respective internal systems. And while these people were volunteers in a sense, getting this done was part of their jobs and had the full backing of their employers. But if their input governed the back-end design and development, there would have been no progress. It was successful (or not) project management to get their involvement in the right amounts at the right times. Without any qualifications whatsoever to offer a judgment on this, I see a development interplay among three groups: the clinicians, the developers of the underlying structure, and the designers of implementing systems. (My guess is that's an obvious and seriously non-profound observation.) Aside from a long anecdote, it strikes me that UI decisions should be kept as separate as possible from any of the underlying structure; that presumption could be rebutted where an identified UI need can't otherwise be satisfied. Of course, at some level that's a nullity because the UI needs really define the structure design. As simple as possible can be quite complex. It's amazing what's been accomplished. Greg Harris
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Hi! On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: Thanks to the java reference implementation I have a demo of importing archetypes to auto generate forms which have the references to the archetype. Nice. Keep up the good work. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: One thing I noticed in the conversion that I don't have any way of distinguishing between a line of text and multiline text in the archetype (I would generate an appropriate pane in the latter case). Perhaps not a big deal. This might be a useful requirement for the current template specification currently being worked on, or possibly a new kind of related specification. I first thought that templates so far had been considered as purely specifying semantics and that they were not supposed to give hints regarding GUI rendering. But now I see a parameter hide_in_ui in the class T_COMPLEX_OBJECT found in the draft template specification. (A similar function is present in the Template Designer tool from Ocean Informatics there is an option to hide elements instead of constraining them to zero occurrence, in the output file this is persisted as hide_on_form=true.) Could anybody detail it's intended use a bit more? I think GUI rendering hints can be appropriate to specify at the same point in time as template design is taking place. If the hints are to be persisted in the template file or in a separate file I guess could be discussed, keeping it in the file could have maintenance advantages, but probably has some disadvantages too. Thoughts? (And no, GUI hints are not appropriate in Archetypes since they are meant to have a wider reuse and the use cases are not known in the same detail as for templates.) In some of our implementation experiments and in discussions with clinicians a possible need for specifying detail levels in templates have surfaced. Some elements from archetypes are easy to completely dismiss or include for the specific use case in mind when designing a template clinicians will say things like this will always be needed or this will never be needed. Other things could be conditional and trickier you can't have all these details om the form - users would go crazy - let them show up if i click a plus-button or if i tick value x was true. The requirement to use GUI screen area optimally is even more pressing when using small input devices such as PDAs. If there was some way of specifying detail level in the template perhaps using a simple integer (0=default, 1..n=deeper detail with increasing number) then the same template could better support automated or semi-automated design of entry forms different screen sizes etc. One naive/simple but useful way of using the integer could be to add a plus-button for things with detail level 1 and within that subform have further plus buttons for level 2 and so on. The conditional requirements are trickier and probably needs more experimentation and evaluation than can be allowed if a first template specification should be completed and released within reasonable time (we all want that). The conditions might also in some cases better be specified in decision support or workflow than in templates. Also a look at the previous work with gradually expanding forms in Clinergy/PenPad should be considered, I believe they were partly auto generated from ontologies. Thoughts? Best regards, Erik Sundvall erisu at imt.liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-227579
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
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GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Hi Eric, Good points. As you know, the NHS use of openEHR to date has been to specify clinical content for the iSoft Lorenzo product, particularly for a number of user-specified forms. One of the areas of difficulty has been the tension between keeping the Template as a description of use-case data content and the requirement to match the UI of the end-user form, both for cross-checking by the users and for the application designers. We found that there is a limit to the extent that this can be done without compromising the quality of the template and underlying archetypes. There is a clear need for some UI rendering suggestions/rules but current thinking is that is best left to another layer of documentation, rather than including it within the Template spec. We did experiment with some 'dummy' UI instruction archetypes but this remains somewhat clumsy. There are a couple of exceptions which through current Ocean use are within the Template Spec 1. 'Hide from UI' is used, very specifically to hide intermediate branch nodes from HTML and Ocean forms representations of the Template. e.g Patient Details Name Structured Name Surname is flattened to Patient Details Surname in the HTML and Ocean forms output. 2. Conditional visiblilty. As you suggest, this can become highly complex but there are some simple, universal conditionals which should be true for all instances e.g Only display if the patient is female, or over a certain age. The latest version of the Ocean Template Editor supports this feature but it is not designed to deal with complex interaction between data and UI, which starts to encroach on decision/ workflow support, or with other 'static' UIrendering advice,like only display if button x is pressed - this is probably best left to a higher layer. A further discussion of the possible requirements for supra-Template UI rendering would be very helpful. Ian Dr Ian McNicoll office / fax +44(0)141 560 4657 mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859 skype ianmcnicoll Consultant - Ocean Informatics ian.mcnicoll at oceaninformatics.com Consultant - IRIS GP Accounts Member of BCS Primary Health Care Specialist Group ? www.phcsg.org 2008/6/27 Erik Sundvall erisu at imt.liu.se: Hi! On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: Thanks to the java reference implementation I have a demo of importing archetypes to auto generate forms which have the references to the archetype. Nice. Keep up the good work. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: One thing I noticed in the conversion that I don't have any way of distinguishing between a line of text and multiline text in the archetype (I would generate an appropriate pane in the latter case). Perhaps not a big deal. This might be a useful requirement for the current template specification currently being worked on, or possibly a new kind of related specification. I first thought that templates so far had been considered as purely specifying semantics and that they were not supposed to give hints regarding GUI rendering. But now I see a parameter hide_in_ui in the class T_COMPLEX_OBJECT found in the draft template specification. (A similar function is present in the Template Designer tool from Ocean Informatics there is an option to hide elements instead of constraining them to zero occurrence, in the output file this is persisted as hide_on_form=true.) Could anybody detail it's intended use a bit more? I think GUI rendering hints can be appropriate to specify at the same point in time as template design is taking place. If the hints are to be persisted in the template file or in a separate file I guess could be discussed, keeping it in the file could have maintenance advantages, but probably has some disadvantages too. Thoughts? (And no, GUI hints are not appropriate in Archetypes since they are meant to have a wider reuse and the use cases are not known in the same detail as for templates.) In some of our implementation experiments and in discussions with clinicians a possible need for specifying detail levels in templates have surfaced. Some elements from archetypes are easy to completely dismiss or include for the specific use case in mind when designing a template clinicians will say things like this will always be needed or this will never be needed. Other things could be conditional and trickier you can't have all these details om the form - users would go crazy - let them show up if i click a plus-button or if i tick value x was true. The requirement to use GUI screen area optimally is even more pressing when using small input devices such as PDAs. If there was some way of specifying detail level in the template perhaps using a simple integer (0=default, 1..n=deeper detail with increasing number) then the same template could better support automated or semi-automated design of entry forms different screen sizes etc. One
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
These are certainly implementation specific issues and IMHO should (must) be left there. --Tim On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 09:05 +0100, Ian McNicoll wrote: Hi Eric, Good points. As you know, the NHS use of openEHR to date has been to specify clinical content for the iSoft Lorenzo product, particularly for a number of user-specified forms. One of the areas of difficulty has been the tension between keeping the Template as a description of use-case data content and the requirement to match the UI of the end-user form, both for cross-checking by the users and for the application designers. We found that there is a limit to the extent that this can be done without compromising the quality of the template and underlying archetypes. There is a clear need for some UI rendering suggestions/rules but current thinking is that is best left to another layer of documentation, rather than including it within the Template spec. We did experiment with some 'dummy' UI instruction archetypes but this remains somewhat clumsy. There are a couple of exceptions which through current Ocean use are within the Template Spec 1. 'Hide from UI' is used, very specifically to hide intermediate branch nodes from HTML and Ocean forms representations of the Template. e.g Patient Details Name Structured Name Surname is flattened to Patient Details Surname in the HTML and Ocean forms output. 2. Conditional visiblilty. As you suggest, this can become highly complex but there are some simple, universal conditionals which should be true for all instances e.g Only display if the patient is female, or over a certain age. The latest version of the Ocean Template Editor supports this feature but it is not designed to deal with complex interaction between data and UI, which starts to encroach on decision/ workflow support, or with other 'static' UIrendering advice,like only display if button x is pressed - this is probably best left to a higher layer. A further discussion of the possible requirements for supra-Template UI rendering would be very helpful. Ian Dr Ian McNicoll office / fax +44(0)141 560 4657 mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859 skype ianmcnicoll Consultant - Ocean Informatics ian.mcnicoll at oceaninformatics.com Consultant - IRIS GP Accounts Member of BCS Primary Health Care Specialist Group ? www.phcsg.org 2008/6/27 Erik Sundvall erisu at imt.liu.se: Hi! On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: Thanks to the java reference implementation I have a demo of importing archetypes to auto generate forms which have the references to the archetype. Nice. Keep up the good work. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: One thing I noticed in the conversion that I don't have any way of distinguishing between a line of text and multiline text in the archetype (I would generate an appropriate pane in the latter case). Perhaps not a big deal. This might be a useful requirement for the current template specification currently being worked on, or possibly a new kind of related specification. I first thought that templates so far had been considered as purely specifying semantics and that they were not supposed to give hints regarding GUI rendering. But now I see a parameter hide_in_ui in the class T_COMPLEX_OBJECT found in the draft template specification. (A similar function is present in the Template Designer tool from Ocean Informatics there is an option to hide elements instead of constraining them to zero occurrence, in the output file this is persisted as hide_on_form=true.) Could anybody detail it's intended use a bit more? I think GUI rendering hints can be appropriate to specify at the same point in time as template design is taking place. If the hints are to be persisted in the template file or in a separate file I guess could be discussed, keeping it in the file could have maintenance advantages, but probably has some disadvantages too. Thoughts? (And no, GUI hints are not appropriate in Archetypes since they are meant to have a wider reuse and the use cases are not known in the same detail as for templates.) In some of our implementation experiments and in discussions with clinicians a possible need for specifying detail levels in templates have surfaced. Some elements from archetypes are easy to completely dismiss or include for the specific use case in mind when designing a template clinicians will say things like this will always be needed or this will never be needed. Other things could be conditional and trickier you can't have all these details om the form - users would go crazy - let them show up if i click a plus-button or if i tick value x was true. The requirement to use GUI screen area optimally is even more pressing when using small input devices such as PDAs.
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
as they should remain purely about the semantics. There are others that don't agree with me. The hide on form function in the Template designer was partly to meet requirements for documentation of the templates for some groups using this technology. I am not sure if the hide_in_ui parameter is going to make it into the final template spec - Tom will have something to say about that. I agree with Hugh - I would push back very strongly on the concept of UI hints in the template definitions. I'd make the point that everyone always thinks that given enough hints computers will be able to intelligently lay out interface components (not just in openehr world - I have seen this in many UI projects). Invariably, the autogenerated interfaces are the exception rather than the rule - by that, I mean that the autogenerated interfaces can be made useful but most real users end up preferring an interface layout designed explicitly by a human being. The classic case in point for this is indeed the blood pressure archetype - where any real user interface would present the data [systolic] / [diastolic] and yet there is no real reason why this is the case (that could be deduced by a computer) Andrew
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Hi all, I think that Eric has a point. I had the same experience when designing a template. I had thoughts about functions in the GUI that I couldn't save together with the template. IMveryHO, the suggestions about how clinicians want the actual GUI to look and work when they are designing their templates should be accommodated for. Just some thoughts: It is not easy to distinguish between just semantics (the template) and the GUI, which is after all all clinicians have to work with in clinical practice. Perhaps clinicians will only want to speak about what informations needs to be presented how, where and when? Perhaps they don't care about the difference between semantics and workflow, GUI, etc.? Anyway, it is intuitive to discuss this in one and the same session. The suggestions for workflow or the GUI could be in the form of hints for auto-generation of the GUI, or just text comments for the human GUI designer. Maybe the template designer can have a layer for non-semantic information linked to points in the template intended for GUI designers, that will not end up in the actual template definitions? Or, another tool could be designed for GUI design. The clinicians will work with this tool, after which Template designers distil the semantics for the templates. As I said, just some ideas. Josina Freriks Tim Cook schreef: These are certainly implementation specific issues and IMHO should (must) be left there. --Tim On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 09:05 +0100, Ian McNicoll wrote: Hi Eric, Good points. As you know, the NHS use of openEHR to date has been to specify clinical content for the iSoft Lorenzo product, particularly for a number of user-specified forms. One of the areas of difficulty has been the tension between keeping the Template as a description of use-case data content and the requirement to match the UI of the end-user form, both for cross-checking by the users and for the application designers. We found that there is a limit to the extent that this can be done without compromising the quality of the template and underlying archetypes. There is a clear need for some UI rendering suggestions/rules but current thinking is that is best left to another layer of documentation, rather than including it within the Template spec. We did experiment with some 'dummy' UI instruction archetypes but this remains somewhat clumsy. There are a couple of exceptions which through current Ocean use are within the Template Spec 1. 'Hide from UI' is used, very specifically to hide intermediate branch nodes from HTML and Ocean forms representations of the Template. e.g Patient Details Name Structured Name Surname is flattened to Patient Details Surname in the HTML and Ocean forms output. 2. Conditional visiblilty. As you suggest, this can become highly complex but there are some simple, universal conditionals which should be true for all instances e.g Only display if the patient is female, or over a certain age. The latest version of the Ocean Template Editor supports this feature but it is not designed to deal with complex interaction between data and UI, which starts to encroach on decision/ workflow support, or with other 'static' UIrendering advice,like only display if button x is pressed - this is probably best left to a higher layer. A further discussion of the possible requirements for supra-Template UI rendering would be very helpful. Ian Dr Ian McNicoll office / fax +44(0)141 560 4657 mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859 skype ianmcnicoll Consultant - Ocean Informatics ian.mcnicoll at oceaninformatics.com Consultant - IRIS GP Accounts Member of BCS Primary Health Care Specialist Group ? www.phcsg.org 2008/6/27 Erik Sundvall erisu at imt.liu.se: Hi! On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: Thanks to the java reference implementation I have a demo of importing archetypes to auto generate forms which have the references to the archetype. Nice. Keep up the good work. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: One thing I noticed in the conversion that I don't have any way of distinguishing between a line of text and multiline text in the archetype (I would generate an appropriate pane in the latter case). Perhaps not a big deal. This might be a useful requirement for the current template specification currently being worked on, or possibly a new kind of related specification. I first thought that templates so far had been considered as purely specifying semantics and that they were not supposed to give hints regarding GUI rendering. But now I see a parameter hide_in_ui in the class T_COMPLEX_OBJECT found in the draft template specification. (A similar function is present in the Template Designer tool from Ocean Informatics there is an option to hide elements instead of
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Hi all, in my opinion it is i) important to have some form of GUI layout descriptions that really enable smart GUI generation in the long run. If not, the whole automatic process stops just before the GUI, which is not really the best we can do in the long run I think. ii) However, it is important to keep this separate from templates. For example, to be able to display what is in a template on different devices ranging from normal to computers via PDAs to potentially your mobile phone, different GUI principles may apply. So essentially to me this sound like it is 1 template to n GUI layout descriptions. Regards Sebastian J.P. Freriks wrote: Hi all, I think that Eric has a point. I had the same experience when designing a template. I had thoughts about functions in the GUI that I couldn't save together with the template. IMveryHO, the suggestions about how clinicians want the actual GUI to look and work when they are designing their templates should be accommodated for. Just some thoughts: It is not easy to distinguish between just semantics (the template) and the GUI, which is after all all clinicians have to work with in clinical practice. Perhaps clinicians will only want to speak about what informations needs to be presented how, where and when? Perhaps they don't care about the difference between semantics and workflow, GUI, etc.? Anyway, it is intuitive to discuss this in one and the same session. The suggestions for workflow or the GUI could be in the form of hints for auto-generation of the GUI, or just text comments for the human GUI designer. Maybe the template designer can have a layer for non-semantic information linked to points in the template intended for GUI designers, that will not end up in the actual template definitions? Or, another tool could be designed for GUI design. The clinicians will work with this tool, after which Template designers distil the semantics for the templates. As I said, just some ideas. Josina Freriks Tim Cook schreef: These are certainly implementation specific issues and IMHO should (must) be left there. --Tim On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 09:05 +0100, Ian McNicoll wrote: Hi Eric, Good points. As you know, the NHS use of openEHR to date has been to specify clinical content for the iSoft Lorenzo product, particularly for a number of user-specified forms. One of the areas of difficulty has been the tension between keeping the Template as a description of use-case data content and the requirement to match the UI of the end-user form, both for cross-checking by the users and for the application designers. We found that there is a limit to the extent that this can be done without compromising the quality of the template and underlying archetypes. There is a clear need for some UI rendering suggestions/rules but current thinking is that is best left to another layer of documentation, rather than including it within the Template spec. We did experiment with some 'dummy' UI instruction archetypes but this remains somewhat clumsy. There are a couple of exceptions which through current Ocean use are within the Template Spec 1. 'Hide from UI' is used, very specifically to hide intermediate branch nodes from HTML and Ocean forms representations of the Template. e.g Patient Details Name Structured Name Surname is flattened to Patient Details Surname in the HTML and Ocean forms output. 2. Conditional visiblilty. As you suggest, this can become highly complex but there are some simple, universal conditionals which should be true for all instances e.g Only display if the patient is female, or over a certain age. The latest version of the Ocean Template Editor supports this feature but it is not designed to deal with complex interaction between data and UI, which starts to encroach on decision/ workflow support, or with other 'static' UIrendering advice,like only display if button x is pressed - this is probably best left to a higher layer. A further discussion of the possible requirements for supra-Template UI rendering would be very helpful. Ian Dr Ian McNicoll office / fax +44(0)141 560 4657 mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859 skype ianmcnicoll Consultant - Ocean Informatics ian.mcnicoll at oceaninformatics.com Consultant - IRIS GP Accounts Member of BCS Primary Health Care Specialist Group ? www.phcsg.org 2008/6/27 Erik Sundvall erisu at imt.liu.se: Hi! On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: Thanks to the java reference implementation I have a demo of importing archetypes to auto generate forms which have the references to the archetype. Nice. Keep up the good work. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: One thing I noticed in the conversion that I don't have any way of distinguishing between a line of text and multiline
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
I think it is possible to make use of the auto-generation capacity afforded by templates to create a draft form, which at least removes some of the grunt work in creating components and binding them tothe the underlying data cnstructs. This can then be manually adjusted and amened to best suit the device used, usability issues and aesthetics. It should be possible to design environments where this can be acheived without breaking the correlation to the underlying template by using some sort of node data-binding link. The Ocean from designer, though not a thing of aesthetic beauty, does allow form components to be resized and moved. Josina - I think it would be a mistake to try to cram in the separate UI requirements to the template designer,. I think there is a place for a specific UI demo tool that lets users and developers investigate appropriate UI options. Ian Dr Ian McNicoll office / fax +44(0)141 560 4657 mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859 skype ianmcnicoll Consultant - Ocean Informatics ian.mcnicoll at oceaninformatics.com Consultant - IRIS GP Accounts Member of BCS Primary Health Care Specialist Group ? www.phcsg.org 2008/6/27 Sebastian Garde sebastian.garde at oceaninformatics.com: Hi all, in my opinion it is i) important to have some form of GUI layout descriptions that really enable smart GUI generation in the long run. If not, the whole automatic process stops just before the GUI, which is not really the best we can do in the long run I think. ii) However, it is important to keep this separate from templates. For example, to be able to display what is in a template on different devices ranging from normal to computers via PDAs to potentially your mobile phone, different GUI principles may apply. So essentially to me this sound like it is 1 template to n GUI layout descriptions. Regards Sebastian J.P. Freriks wrote: Hi all, I think that Eric has a point. I had the same experience when designing a template. I had thoughts about functions in the GUI that I couldn't save together with the template. IMveryHO, the suggestions about how clinicians want the actual GUI to look and work when they are designing their templates should be accommodated for. Just some thoughts: It is not easy to distinguish between just semantics (the template) and the GUI, which is after all all clinicians have to work with in clinical practice. Perhaps clinicians will only want to speak about what informations needs to be presented how, where and when? Perhaps they don't care about the difference between semantics and workflow, GUI, etc.? Anyway, it is intuitive to discuss this in one and the same session. The suggestions for workflow or the GUI could be in the form of hints for auto-generation of the GUI, or just text comments for the human GUI designer. Maybe the template designer can have a layer for non-semantic information linked to points in the template intended for GUI designers, that will not end up in the actual template definitions? Or, another tool could be designed for GUI design. The clinicians will work with this tool, after which Template designers distil the semantics for the templates. As I said, just some ideas. Josina Freriks Tim Cook schreef: These are certainly implementation specific issues and IMHO should (must) be left there. --Tim On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 09:05 +0100, Ian McNicoll wrote: Hi Eric, Good points. As you know, the NHS use of openEHR to date has been to specify clinical content for the iSoft Lorenzo product, particularly for a number of user-specified forms. One of the areas of difficulty has been the tension between keeping the Template as a description of use-case data content and the requirement to match the UI of the end-user form, both for cross-checking by the users and for the application designers. We found that there is a limit to the extent that this can be done without compromising the quality of the template and underlying archetypes. There is a clear need for some UI rendering suggestions/rules but current thinking is that is best left to another layer of documentation, rather than including it within the Template spec. We did experiment with some 'dummy' UI instruction archetypes but this remains somewhat clumsy. There are a couple of exceptions which through current Ocean use are within the Template Spec 1. 'Hide from UI' is used, very specifically to hide intermediate branch nodes from HTML and Ocean forms representations of the Template. e.g Patient Details Name Structured Name Surname is flattened to Patient Details Surname in the HTML and Ocean forms output. 2. Conditional visiblilty. As you suggest, this can become highly complex but there are some simple, universal conditionals which should be true for all instances e.g Only display if the patient is female, or over a certain age. The latest version of the Ocean Template Editor supports this
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Would also want GUI things like hide_in_GUI to be in a separate artifact on top of a template. It is good to hear that Ocean only did that as quick fix to meet customers requirements, which is very plausible. As mentioned before templates are great to initially SCAFFOLD a GUI, which has to be further adapted by humans for the best possible usability results (use-case and device specific). This allows verification of the templates and archetypes from a user point of view and is very important as Richard pointed out. I can understand Josinas comments about clinicians not caring about the difference between semantics and GUI stuff, so a tool like the Template Designer should hide this important separation, where appropriate. Thilo On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Hugh Leslie hugh.leslie at oceaninformatics.com wrote: Hi Erik Personally, I don't think that templates should contain GUI rendering hints as they should remain purely about the semantics. There are others that don't agree with me. The hide on form function in the Template designer was partly to meet requirements for documentation of the templates for some groups using this technology. I am not sure if the hide_in_ui parameter is going to make it into the final template spec - Tom will have something to say about that. Personally, I think that there should be some other artifact that details GUI specs - if we mix up the two things, then the purpose of the template becomes confused. Templates can be used for everything from GUI, to data instance, persistance and query. If we add a whole lot of parameters around GUI, then we will also probably need to add specific things for these other uses and it might get very messy. regards Hugh Erik Sundvall wrote: Hi! On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: Thanks to the java reference implementation I have a demo of importing archetypes to auto generate forms which have the references to the archetype. Nice. Keep up the good work. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: One thing I noticed in the conversion that I don't have any way of distinguishing between a line of text and multiline text in the archetype (I would generate an appropriate pane in the latter case). Perhaps not a big deal. This might be a useful requirement for the current template specification currently being worked on, or possibly a new kind of related specification. I first thought that templates so far had been considered as purely specifying semantics and that they were not supposed to give hints regarding GUI rendering. But now I see a parameter hide_in_ui in the class T_COMPLEX_OBJECT found in the draft template specification. (A similar function is present in the Template Designer tool from Ocean Informatics there is an option to hide elements instead of constraining them to zero occurrence, in the output file this is persisted as hide_on_form=true.) Could anybody detail it's intended use a bit more? I think GUI rendering hints can be appropriate to specify at the same point in time as template design is taking place. If the hints are to be persisted in the template file or in a separate file I guess could be discussed, keeping it in the file could have maintenance advantages, but probably has some disadvantages too. Thoughts? (And no, GUI hints are not appropriate in Archetypes since they are meant to have a wider reuse and the use cases are not known in the same detail as for templates.) In some of our implementation experiments and in discussions with clinicians a possible need for specifying detail levels in templates have surfaced. Some elements from archetypes are easy to completely dismiss or include for the specific use case in mind when designing a template clinicians will say things like this will always be needed or this will never be needed. Other things could be conditional and trickier you can't have all these details om the form - users would go crazy - let them show up if i click a plus-button or if i tick value x was true. The requirement to use GUI screen area optimally is even more pressing when using small input devices such as PDAs. If there was some way of specifying detail level in the template perhaps using a simple integer (0=default, 1..n=deeper detail with increasing number) then the same template could better support automated or semi-automated design of entry forms different screen sizes etc. One naive/simple but useful way of using the integer could be to add a plus-button for things with detail level 1 and within that subform have further plus buttons for level 2 and so on. The conditional requirements are trickier and probably needs more experimentation and evaluation than can be allowed if a first template specification should be completed and released within reasonable time (we all want that). The conditions might also in some cases
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 12:30 +0200, Thilo Schuler wrote: I can understand Josinas comments about clinicians not caring about the difference between semantics and GUI stuff, so a tool like the Template Designer should hide this important separation, where appropriate. Not withstanding your 'where appropriate' caveat. The clinicians creating templates (as with archetypes) need to have training and a special understanding of what is at stake. If the clinicians designing archetypes/templates do not care about the difference between semantics and GUI stuff then they are they wrong clinicians to be designing archetypes and templates. sarcasm They should probably be designing another By Physicians for Physicians EMR. Do we really need another one of those? We also do not need another EHR built by clueless IT people. /sarcasm That's not meant to disparage the clinicians on the various openEHR mailing lists. This is a multidisciplinary issue and it takes all of us to do this the right way. Again, the 'right' people must be the ones designing the knowledge modules. My 2 pence. --Tim -- next part -- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20080627/976968f8/attachment.asc
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:54:36AM -0300, Tim Cook wrote: They should probably be designing another By Physicians for Physicians EMR. Do we really need another one of those? No we don't and some of them are only still existing until sufficiently advanced OpenEHR based implementations exist (and, no, PatientOS doesn't count towards that because its focus quite apparently is inpatient care). Karsten -- GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD 4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Hi all, My thoughts on this is so far our experience with templates are mostly related to screen forms and GUI widgets. It's probably easiest to relate to screens when engage clinicians for templates reviewing, hence the need for visual presentation of templates from the NHS work. We also want to reuse the semantics in templates to generate messages, reports etc. The question is how much 'generic' semantics can be reused from the templates built for specific purpose - screen templates, message templates and report templates. Surely the content for all types of templates will be quite different and we probably would like to have special syntax to support GUI hints, but do we need special syntax to support other uses? How about indicators for decision support, clinical research data and information lifecycle management? I am thinking about an extendable markup language that can be plugged into the core template language as a way to add extensions to templates if there is any application specific meta-data required. I am also in favour of the idea to store these extra meta-data inside the templates to ease the maintenance. When passing these templates around, the template engines can ignore the extended markup and only process the standard part if they don't recognize the extended syntax. Something like gui_markup_plugin hide_in_GUI path=.../ hide_in_GUI path=.../ /gui_markup_plugin Cheers, Rong On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Thilo Schuler thilo.schuler at gmail.com wrote: Would also want GUI things like hide_in_GUI to be in a separate artifact on top of a template. It is good to hear that Ocean only did that as quick fix to meet customers requirements, which is very plausible. As mentioned before templates are great to initially SCAFFOLD a GUI, which has to be further adapted by humans for the best possible usability results (use-case and device specific). This allows verification of the templates and archetypes from a user point of view and is very important as Richard pointed out. I can understand Josinas comments about clinicians not caring about the difference between semantics and GUI stuff, so a tool like the Template Designer should hide this important separation, where appropriate. Thilo On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Hugh Leslie hugh.leslie at oceaninformatics.com wrote: Hi Erik Personally, I don't think that templates should contain GUI rendering hints as they should remain purely about the semantics. There are others that don't agree with me. The hide on form function in the Template designer was partly to meet requirements for documentation of the templates for some groups using this technology. I am not sure if the hide_in_ui parameter is going to make it into the final template spec - Tom will have something to say about that. Personally, I think that there should be some other artifact that details GUI specs - if we mix up the two things, then the purpose of the template becomes confused. Templates can be used for everything from GUI, to data instance, persistance and query. If we add a whole lot of parameters around GUI, then we will also probably need to add specific things for these other uses and it might get very messy. regards Hugh Erik Sundvall wrote: Hi! On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: Thanks to the java reference implementation I have a demo of importing archetypes to auto generate forms which have the references to the archetype. Nice. Keep up the good work. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: One thing I noticed in the conversion that I don't have any way of distinguishing between a line of text and multiline text in the archetype (I would generate an appropriate pane in the latter case). Perhaps not a big deal. This might be a useful requirement for the current template specification currently being worked on, or possibly a new kind of related specification. I first thought that templates so far had been considered as purely specifying semantics and that they were not supposed to give hints regarding GUI rendering. But now I see a parameter hide_in_ui in the class T_COMPLEX_OBJECT found in the draft template specification. (A similar function is present in the Template Designer tool from Ocean Informatics there is an option to hide elements instead of constraining them to zero occurrence, in the output file this is persisted as hide_on_form=true.) Could anybody detail it's intended use a bit more? I think GUI rendering hints can be appropriate to specify at the same point in time as template design is taking place. If the hints are to be persisted in the template file or in a separate file I guess could be discussed, keeping it in the file could have maintenance advantages, but probably has some disadvantages too. Thoughts?
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Very interesting - maybe we could have seperate namespaces for the core tags and extensions. Could be a good compromise! While I see the advantages of keeping GUI stuff out of the template, I also see that this more and more complicated as we add additional abstraction layers. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:26 PM, Rong Chen rong.acode at gmail.com wrote: Hi all, My thoughts on this is so far our experience with templates are mostly related to screen forms and GUI widgets. It's probably easiest to relate to screens when engage clinicians for templates reviewing, hence the need for visual presentation of templates from the NHS work. We also want to reuse the semantics in templates to generate messages, reports etc. The question is how much 'generic' semantics can be reused from the templates built for specific purpose - screen templates, message templates and report templates. Surely the content for all types of templates will be quite different and we probably would like to have special syntax to support GUI hints, but do we need special syntax to support other uses? How about indicators for decision support, clinical research data and information lifecycle management? I am thinking about an extendable markup language that can be plugged into the core template language as a way to add extensions to templates if there is any application specific meta-data required. I am also in favour of the idea to store these extra meta-data inside the templates to ease the maintenance. When passing these templates around, the template engines can ignore the extended markup and only process the standard part if they don't recognize the extended syntax. Something like gui_markup_plugin hide_in_GUI path=.../ hide_in_GUI path=.../ /gui_markup_plugin Cheers, Rong On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Thilo Schuler thilo.schuler at gmail.com wrote: Would also want GUI things like hide_in_GUI to be in a separate artifact on top of a template. It is good to hear that Ocean only did that as quick fix to meet customers requirements, which is very plausible. As mentioned before templates are great to initially SCAFFOLD a GUI, which has to be further adapted by humans for the best possible usability results (use-case and device specific). This allows verification of the templates and archetypes from a user point of view and is very important as Richard pointed out. I can understand Josinas comments about clinicians not caring about the difference between semantics and GUI stuff, so a tool like the Template Designer should hide this important separation, where appropriate. Thilo On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Hugh Leslie hugh.leslie at oceaninformatics.com wrote: Hi Erik Personally, I don't think that templates should contain GUI rendering hints as they should remain purely about the semantics. There are others that don't agree with me. The hide on form function in the Template designer was partly to meet requirements for documentation of the templates for some groups using this technology. I am not sure if the hide_in_ui parameter is going to make it into the final template spec - Tom will have something to say about that. Personally, I think that there should be some other artifact that details GUI specs - if we mix up the two things, then the purpose of the template becomes confused. Templates can be used for everything from GUI, to data instance, persistance and query. If we add a whole lot of parameters around GUI, then we will also probably need to add specific things for these other uses and it might get very messy. regards Hugh Erik Sundvall wrote: Hi! On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: Thanks to the java reference implementation I have a demo of importing archetypes to auto generate forms which have the references to the archetype. Nice. Keep up the good work. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 07:08, Greg Caulton caultonpos at gmail.com wrote: One thing I noticed in the conversion that I don't have any way of distinguishing between a line of text and multiline text in the archetype (I would generate an appropriate pane in the latter case). Perhaps not a big deal. This might be a useful requirement for the current template specification currently being worked on, or possibly a new kind of related specification. I first thought that templates so far had been considered as purely specifying semantics and that they were not supposed to give hints regarding GUI rendering. But now I see a parameter hide_in_ui in the class T_COMPLEX_OBJECT found in the draft template specification. (A similar function is present in the Template Designer tool from Ocean Informatics there is an option to hide elements instead of constraining them to zero occurrence, in the output file this is persisted as hide_on_form=true.)
GUI-hints in openEHR templates? (Was: PatientOS archetype to form demo (of sorts))
Heather, You are correct. Do not mix things. Tools become to complex. And healthcare providers loose focus. When designing archetypes we see the archetype screen. When designing and discussing templates we see the template screen. But when discussing data entry and data presentation screens we see them. For each its own tooling and ways to present. Thinking about the presentation aspect: - There are several levels: - parts of the data/information that display urgent matters that have to be signaled and that this fact needs to be documented. - local arrangements that deal with conditional context dependent presentation, the functionality of a electronic form - local arrangements that deal with local preferences on location on the screen, presentation forms, fonts, colors, etc. Gerard -- private -- Gerard Freriks, MD Huigsloterdijk 378 2158 LR Buitenkaag The Netherlands T: +31 252544896 M: +31 620347088 E: gfrer at luna.nl Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin 11 Nov 1755 On Jun 27, 2008, at 2:40 PM, Heather Leslie wrote: Hi all, From where I sit the issue being discussed here is an old one essentially about human nature - we all respond most easily to that which we know and understand. In designing a website we know that if you want input about navigation, then don't have any meaningful content or GUI hints available or almost certainly all the feedback will be about the size or color of the button and the font and position of the heading. Similarly my concern in designing templates and getting the content reviewed appropriately is that as soon as you add interface/GUI features to make it more 'intuitive' to the clinicians their focus goes immediately to that which is more familiar. That is, the feedback tends to be related to their user interface experience (naturally gained from their day-to-day use of their current clinical system) rather than actually critiquing which archetypes have been used, which data fields are presented, and all their associated attributes, cardinality, constraints and related metadata etc etc. So my preferred response (and from positive experience) is to spend a relatively small amount of time to educate the clinicians on how to feedback appropriately and meaningfully on the pure archetypes and templates - we have done this successfully, but I suggest it is probably optimal if a clinician involved in the design (perhaps a health informatician with a leg in 'both camps') to walk them thru the models and to make it a sensible conversation. It is my opinion that the GUI design and review should be completely separate to the content design and review - mixing the two gets very confusing. Regards Heather -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20080627/02f94708/attachment.html
