Resolved:Realm

The term Realm (previously also referred to as Context of Use) is used in different ways:

1. It is often used to identify an Affiliate organization or a country, e.g. in statements like "This issue is realm specific", "this is a U.S. Realm use-case". Here we commonly understand that something belongs to this Affiliate as a whole.
2. It may indicate a namespace realm: a "namespacing" mechanism for artifact identifiers (the CA, UK, UV, etc. that appear near the end of artifact ids). Its value is either an alphabetic string (no longer limited to 2 characters) registered with HL7 or an OID. Each namespace realm has a namespace realm owner: the authorising entity that is responsible for what can legitimately be put in the realm. Anyone who wants to should be able to create artifacts in separate realm-namespaces.
3. It may indicate a binding realm: this manages the bindings/substitutions of Valuesets and CMETs (and templates and datatype specialisations if and when substitution rules for these are agreed) to reflect local rules. It is the realm communicated by InfrastructureRoot.realmCode and determines conformance rules for vocab, datatype, etc. Each binding-realm has a binding realm owner: this organization must be an Affiliate.

While initially, the latter two purposes had considerable overlap, reality is that they should be quite distinct.

When a realm identifier is issued, a record will be kept as to whether that is to be used for namespaces, bindings, or both.

Consequences

• An Affiliate may maintain more than a single realm.
• A realm is not necessarily "equal to a country". We may have realms like "Dutch-German cross-border hospitalisation" or "European-Indian dentist tourism".

Questions

• What realm code is to be used, if an Affiliate is assigned to be the owner for a second realm?

Recommendations

• It is the responsibility of MnM to maintain these definitions -- with agreement from vocab and conformance, who must use the agreed terms (resolutions needed from each committee to that effect)
• Publishing should manage the issuing of realm short codes for now (resolution from the committee to that effect - with instructions as to how to request one)
• Upon approval these terms are to be added to the glossary, and the definitions will be maintained as core glossary definitions (realm is currently defined as a core glossary term)
• All documents that discuss realm or context will be updated to use the appropriate term, and to have it hyperlinked to the glossary. This includes Vocabulary, RIM, Conformance and Localisation, the V3 Guide and the glossary. This should be done as a technical correction to the version in the ballot package, and be validated by ballot next time the documents go through an approval cycle.
• MnM should establish whether these changes can be made to the material that is published in the normative edition without being balloted. They may seek advise from ARB. A resolution of the committee is needed to clarify.