TermInfo Principles

Draft Principles

1. Recommendations will provide guidance on overlap between the terminology and information models
   1. Include when (and when not) to post-coordinate
2. Recommendations will be driven by use cases
   1. Guide will include specific and consistent examples of clinical information
   2. Use cases will include not only clinical information but also technical constraints
3. Recommendations will align with the goals of terminology development organizations (including HL7 and others)
4. Recommendations must be implementable by stakeholder user communities
   1. This may mean that recommendations must support more than one approach
5. Recommendations will support consistent precision of representation between the terminology and the information model. [I’m still not sure I understand this one. Original text: “Evaluate consistency and precision of representation between the terminology and the information model ”]
   1. Semantics must be explicit, even in tools that do not easily support explicit semantics (e.g., class diagrams, RDBMS).
   2. When recommendations provide options, they will specify patterns for semantically rigorous transformations among options. (Last two may overlap a bit)

Draft Objectives

• Clearly and explicitly guide standards modelers in incorporating SCT and LOINC values into HL7 V2 and V3 artifacts in ways that fulfill the semantic constraints of both information model and terminology.
• Provide implementers (e.g., software developers) with clear guidance on their options for representing data in instances.
• Provide information consumers (e.g., report writers or researchers) with clear descriptions of the semantics of conforming artifacts.
• Provide terminology developers with clear feedback on the uses to which terminologies are put.