HL7 V3 Tools Task Force
MIF Teleconference Notes
December 2, 2003
Participants:
Ben Van De Walle, Charlie McCay, Geoff Roberts, Jane Curry, Laura Sato,
Lloyd McKenzie,Sylvia Webb
1. General Update
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Lloyd noted that he had made recent static model changes in the MIF, including
disambiguating association names for the children of choice elements (allowing some
reflection in the name of choice history).
Lloyd is making slow progress in adding schematron rules for the MIF, and expects to
have these completed for the January meeting.
Sylvia offered to complete her review of the MIF and send comments to Lloyd or the
list within the next week.
2. Templates
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Jane asked Lloyd to make a presentation in January at the joint MnM/Templates
meeting (Tuesday, Jan.20, Q4), describing his proposal for how Templates would be
represented in the MIF. Lloyd agreed to do this.
Jane informed the group that she is putting together a project charter for Templates
Harmonisation (across message design, archetypes, and documents) for HL7.
3. Dynamic Model
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Jane mentioned that dynamic model issues had been discussed at the November
Interim meeting, and that this would be the focus of MnM discussion in January on
Tuesday, Jan.20, Q1 and Q2. Jane expected that MIF representation issues would
be part of this discussion.
4. Representing Version Info in Artefact IDs
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Lloyd indicated that he is still working on the transform to demonstrate safe
conversion of an artefact in the MIF from A-to-B-and-back-to-A, preserving version
information.
5. Allowing Redundancy in the MIF
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Charlie noted that automated MIF processing is greatly facilitated by allowing
redundancy (additional 'concrete', rather than inferred, connections) in MIF
representation. Lloyd recognised that processing efficiency is supported by this, but
prefers to disallow all redundant class representations in order to ease MIF
maintenance (e.g. reducing the need to update the same info in multiple places within
the MIF, particularly for editing by hand).
Charlie and Lloyd agreed that the base MIF could remain 'fully reduced' (nonredundant) and an intermediate 'processor-friendly' MIF transform (generated from
the base MIF) could also be established which would ease MIF adoption by tools.
Charlie and Lloyd also agreed that the base MIF and the redundant MIF
representation should be stored together.
HL7 V3 Tools Task Force
MIF Teleconference Notes
December 2, 2003
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Lloyd noted that he would like the info to build a schema and the info to build an
instance to be included within the MIF (i.e. so that the MIF would contain an attribute
or element name as well as the information about how it was derived).
6. Other - Eclipse
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Lloyd asked Geoff about licensing constraints related to the Eclipse development
framework. Geoff noted that modular plug-ins to Eclipse could retain copyright
outside of Eclipse. He informed the group that Eclipse provides some support to
ActiveX, OLE, other Java, XML, and VB code, including displaying it and some
interaction. Geoff observed that Eclipse is particularly good for setting up suites for
unit tests and integration work.
Lloyd noted that, if HL7 adopts Eclipse as a longterm framework, it could support a
movement away from Visio code towards full platform independence. Laura noted
that this consideration should form part of the analysis for longterm architectural plans
for HL7 tooling (perhaps as part of the VA deliverables).
7. Other - OCL
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Sylvia asked the group where to find information about OCL use. Lloyd told her that it
was defined as part of the UML specification, which can be found at the OMG site, or
at the MnM website (under Documents and Presentations).
8. Next task force conference calls
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Architecture - Tuesday, Dec. 9, 4-5pm UK (11am-noon Eastern, etc.)
MIF - Tuesday, Dec. 16, 4-5pm UK (11am-noon Eastern, etc.)
Suggested break - no conference calls Dec. 23 or Dec. 30
Architecture - Tuesday, Jan. 6, 4-5pm UK (11am-noon Eastern, etc.)