First off I would concur with what most people seem to be saying on this thread. Effective interoperability almost always requires the exchange of common codelists, value lists and the like. The case of the facility registry in Rwanda is a case in point. There are a number of implicit codelists (facility type, ownership, etc) which need to be made visible to users of the data.
For each application using controlled vocabularies to have to make those codelists browseable or otherwise publicly available might be seen as excessively cumbersome (I haven’t completely made my mind up on this). Certainly within a domain scope such as national ministry of health, WHO, Pepfar or what have you, it makes very good sense to me to have central repositories of such structural metadata.
What such a repo might look like could vary considerably … the bottom of the pile being a static web page with links to csv files.
Unfortunately the apparent simplicity of coded vocabularies (terminologies?) as flat lists, as we have seen, are often not adequate. Two typical challenges to represent are selections of subsets and the encoding of hierarchy. Some of the attempts at addressing this domain that have crossed my radar include
- genericode
- topic maps
- skos (and rdf-datacube)
- cts2
(The first two are maybe slightly exotic and dated, but lots of good ideas in both)
CTS2 seems really well worked and also with a strong health heritage. I share to an extent Jack’s caution that, even with the hl7 and omg connections, all the action does seem to have been driven from one company. Something like Metadata Technologies with SDMX. Its a good niche market.
My sense would be to look primarily at user base and eco-system of FOSS supportive tools if I were to try and implement something in country. An xml database with skos codelists might be one approach which is easy to implement. There are no doubt others.
What I know least about is the data model for the apelon DTS. Is there a good link for that and is there any consensus building process around it?
Regards
Bob
From: Bob Jolliffe
Sent: Oct 29, 2013 6:18 PM
To: Jack Bowie
Cc: ohie-architecture@googlegroups.com, Derek Ritz , Jack Bowie
Subject: Re: OpenHIE IHE profiles for coordinated communication
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For general use tables, I would suggest using the CDC PHIN VADS system (https://phinvads.cdc.gov) which contains lots of standard codesets (HL7 standard tables, LOINC, ICD-9 and -10, SNOMED) and all have OIDs.
···
On 29 October 2013 14:51, Jack Bowie jack.bowie@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, all. In general, a TS can be used as the “source of truth” for any number of code sets/code systems/ontologies, etc. (pick your favorite term). Different organizations Canadian provinces, US States, etc., all have their own policies, but centralization of these “reference sets” seems to be a good idea. DTS, for example, has a very robust data model that seems to be able to represent a broad set of data representations. CTS 2 is about the only TS API standard that encompases a wide enough set of capabilities to be generally useful, but it is also very complex (lots of methods) and doesn’t even specify the format of some payloads. There are not very many commercial implementations, mostly just the Mayo “reference” implementation.
To respond to Hannes’ comment, we have demonstrated some very preliminary CTS 2 interfaces for DTS V4 (our new version) but this is currently incomplete. A moderate development effort would be required to produce an operational interface.
Jack
On Tuesday, October 29, 2013 3:25:06 AM UTC-4, Ryan Crichton wrote:
Just including Jack in case he is not on the architecture group. @Jack, see below, there have been a few questions about terminology and Apelon DTS on this thread that I’m sure you can help answer for us
Cheers,
Ryan
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 4:21 AM, Derek Ritz derek...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Ryan.
I think code sets are maintained in the TS but will confirm with colleagues. The one who will have the best insights on this is Jack. Specifically, we should find out how Apelon is deployed in Alberta (one of Canada’s provinces). They were an early Apelon reference site.
Derek.
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Ryan Crichton
Software Developer, Jembi Health Systems | SOUTH AFRICA
Mobile: +27845829934 | Skype: ryan.graham.crichton
E-mail: ry...@jembi.org
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