Phoenix WGM Report

International Affiliates

Representatives form 17 countries are present at the WGM. Two new affiliates have been created: HL7 Chili and HL7 Sweden. The Strategic Planning Comittee gave an update on the status of their work. The European Affiliates will consider creating an "European HL7 Ambassador" position to represent the HL7 affiliates in contacts with the European Union.

The Affiliates present at the meeting gave a status update about activities in their respective realms; Chuck Meyer presented the USA Realm activities.

The May 2007 WGM will be held in Berlin, Germany. The exact dates and location will be announced at a later point in time. The international interoperability meeting (formerly known as the international affiliates meeting) will be held in Cologne, Germany, on August 24 and 25 2006. The interoperability meeting will be focused on standards implementation experiences, where WGMs focus on standard development.

Normative Edition 2006

The v3 Normative Edition will be published latest february of 2006. New normative content was created for the Master File/registry domain, Personell Management and CMETs.

Use of Wiki's by HL7

On Tuesday evening a "Wiki Nite" was held to discuss the use of Wiki technology and other Collaborative Technologies by the HL7 community. The basic functionality of a Wiki was demonstrated. This was followed by a discussion related to how the HL7 community currently uses the Wiki, and for what purposes a Wiki would be the most suitable technology. It was the consensus that any "dynamic content" that is potentially authored by multiple sources is a good candidate for the Wiki. Static content (e.g. a finalized text, finilized meeting minutes) is probably better at home in a document repository or the HL7 website.

Skype (the chat option thereof) was briefly discussed as an example of another technology which supports the colaborative process: during WGMs this is frequently used for brief communications between domain-experts that take part in seperate committee meetings. As such it supports cross-committee communications.

Report from INM

INM (formerly known as CQ) had one document open for ballot: Shared Messages. We made progress on the reconciliation of this ballot and items from previous ballot cycles (Abstract Transport Specification-ATS, Transmission Wrappers, Webservices Profile). The Shared Message ballot is likely to be reconciled in the near future, the other documents till need more work.

The introduction of the Batch Wrapper in the Transmission Wrapper domain, the attempt to fit various type of middleware solutions in the ATS architectural model, and a number of new use-cases and proposals will keep us busy for the next few months. Given the size of the issue list the INM comittee may organize an out-of-cycle meeting related to Transmission Wrappers/ATS, and the Transport Specifications.

Documents going out for ballot in May 2006 will include: Removable Media ("v3 on CD"), ebXML, XML ITS Datatypes, and Shared Messages.

In general the week went relatively smoothly - the only annoying issues were frequent interruptions by car alarms, and the fact that there was no internet in the meeting rooms. This has a direct impact on the work of the comittee, e.g. files have to be shared by means of memory stick instead of by e-mail, and Action Items have to be copied to/from Word-based minutes, and can't be edited on the HL7 Wiki were they normally reside.