Datatypes R2 Issue 26

Introduction

There is a need to create a special datatype off ED for CDA datatype

An old motion from INM: Data types need to support data type requirements of CDA, In particular the narrative block should be available as a mime type for ED. And CDA should use data types properly.

Not sure now what the last bit is about, but we need to create the CDA datatype, and get them to use it.

? backward compatible.

Discussion

The concept is to create a special CDA narrative datatype. We can model it as a specialisation of ED. It would have a fixed mediatype (but not the standard CDA mediatype, that's for a whole document. so it would probably be XML).

The interesting thing about the CDA is the structured narrative - it's a little mini hypertext model. We can choose to model the CDA document at the abstract level as a plain sequence of bytes (plain ED) and ignore the content, or we can try to model the content. I recommend simply a plain ED.

At the xml level, we need to bind the CDA narrative datatype to the CDA narrative schema. This raises interesting ownership questions, specially in regard to ballot procedures. It would be right for the ITS sig to own the schema, but it ballots on a different cycle to structured documents.

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