Context Conduction in RIMBAA Applications

Summary

• HL7 v3 contains a definition for Context Conduction. Particulary for RIMBAA implementations the support for this methodology is crucial - querying part of an object tree without knowing what conducts where could lead to real problems. For example: if you want to pull a subset out of a object hierarchy - you'll have to first determine the conducted context to the subset, before actually creating the subset.
• This page seeks to discuss ways in which people have implemented this, and to document best practices.

Analysis

There seem to be two options when one received a serialized v3 model in a RIMBAA context:

1. denormalize the conduction, i.e. replicate the conducted context (participations, act relationships) where appropiriate. The RIMBAA application (except when importing/exporting the data) is agnostic as to the meaning of context conduction.
2. deal with the conductivity at 'run-time', i.e. whenever a query is made determine what conducts and include that in the response. There are obvious performance issues associated with this option.

• What are the advantages/drawbacks of these two options? Whi has chosen to use what option?

• There are problems with the current definition of context conduction. What are its feasblae parts, what parts are broken (based on RIMBAA implemenetation experiences, not in theory)?

Java SIG Reference implementation

Peter Hendler: I added some context conduction to the javaSIG API. Gunther felt that the time it took to process was not shorter than the extra time it took him to do a more complex query with more joins. He felt that the way the context conduction was done could be improved but I don't think we ever added that to the reference implementation. There are some settings in the build.xml file that you set on or off for context conduction.