Template Registry

There were plenty more people here on Phoenix on Friday than usually. That's because Phoenix is having a major rainstorm, rather than there being a ton of great topics being discussed on this last day of the HL7 Working group meeting. However, there was one topic that I did especially stay for:

Templates Registry Pilot Kickoff

The Templates workgroup hosted a morning joint meeting with the Structured Documents, Patient Care and Vocabulary workgroups to kick off the Templates Registry Pilot project.  This project builds off the requirements that came from the Templates Registry Business Requirements project, which can be found in the HL7 Templates Registry GForge site.  We reviewed a slide deck descrfibing these requirements at a high level.

The rest of the meeting we spent going over what our first steps would be and started to put together a plan for the first few iterations of development.  A large number of people in the room volunteered to participate in various aspects of using the registry and designing some of the components, but we are still looking for resources to help with the development.

Iteration I will consist of a key design document on the registry metadata content, and development of one major component to support registration of templates and viewing of a template registration.  The registry metadata content will likely be derived from the ISO 15000 eBusiness Registry Information Model which provides a schema for registry metadata.  There are open source implementations of these specifications available on Source Forge, and the registry standard is freely available  on the OASIS web site.  It will include by necessity some limited ability to integrate through terminology services likely through a very simple interface, and will also house a light-weight template repository for those contributors who cannot store their artifacts elsewhere on the web.  The first UIs will be very light on features.

Iteration II will add UI to support terminology lookup and review processes.

During the meeting we identified a new requirement not previously captured which was the ability to mark templates that an organization is using.  This could be used to make the community aware of who is using a particular template for the purposes of notification (which we did cover in the requirements), but which could also be used to help build a community around templates.

In parallel with these efforts we will need to review available technology for the notification infrastructure, user credentialling and audit, and possible infrastructures to incorporate that support CTS.

All in all it was a successful kick-off, and at least 15 people signed up to help in different phases.

     Keith