Report of News 2006

  • new home at http://aurora.regenstrief.org/javasig
    • reason for the move was that we had difficulties getting our collaborators signed up to the NSCEE based CVS home
  • moved to subversion as code repository, importing all the previous CVS revisions, now subversion is our only home. Reasons:
    • subversion is easier to use for maintenance
    • subversion allows easy anonymous read access
  • at the same time we made major rearrangement to the environment in order to make the code truely available as open source. This included
    • remove all of HL7 intell. prop. encumbered MIF files, including rim.coremif and vocab files.
    • removed old material which was no longer needed.
    • implemented nightly builts of
      • ZIP file snapshots, which contain binary and source code
        • can be used standalone and free of HL7 IP encumbered MIFs,
        • yet still containing all our source code, including generated code, for the prospective adopter to explore and modify
      • up to date API documentation available online
    • easier threshold of entry for new prospective adopters
  • On the functionality side, the work has been
    • Fixing a number of bugs, rather cleanup past mistakes on the parser and builder and hibernate persistence.
    • Testing has mostly been in the context of Gunther's own use of the software for his e-prescribing system.
    • Consolidated the merger package which now handles all issues of merging data which was parsed from XML into the Java objects, including
      • reading from caches to connect intra-message pointers
      • reading from database to connect to persistent data (allowing persistent data to be updated through HL7 XML
    • Added a MessageServlet? along with a standalone web-server (jetty) to allow simple creation of HL7 services
      • see webServer target and etc/web.xml configuration
      • Note: we are still not processing wrappers
      • modified the code to be configurable within a threadded environment (as it is the case with web servers.)
      • these functions are extensively used and validated in Gunther's project
    • Improved the HPath language to include variable references.
      • HPath is an interpreted expression, navigation and querying language over HL7 RIM object structures, which is
      • similar to XPath, but object oriented. This is
      • used to navigate through RIM object graphs,
        • query for specific data ("where clauses in [brackets]), and contains
        • "conversions" are bi-directional converters between HL7 data types and Java builtin data types.
          • used to connect HL7 data to GUIs (such as Gunther's Eclipse/SWT based GUI framework).
      • HPath has also been prototyped in the Observation.derivationExpr to demonstrate HL7 RIM structured used for calculated observations (such as Body-mass-index or Glasgow Coma Score).
    • Peter Hendler is working with GUIs to create CDA documents
    • Pratik Parikh has taken the job of replacing our metadata API with Grahame's recent work.
  • Stakeholders and Community
    • Main contributors and users are still a small group
      • Gunther Schadow and his team (103 commits)
        • Gunther Schadow has a grant from AHRQ to use this for a new open-source e-prescribing system (provider order entry and EHR). This project has now entered year 3 and will probably have one extension year 4 ending in September 2008. He's targeting small and rural providers and has two collaborators who are planning to implement and test. Gunther's code, which is separate from the javasig commons, is under GNU General Public License (GPL).
      • Peter Hendler (55 commits)
        • Peter Hendler is doing some promotion work to apply this within Kaiser. He also works with Enrique (sp?) who is on a similar mission to create a CDA creator tool based on our code.
      • Pratik Parikh (8 commits)
        • Pratik is with a new employer, but still mostly working in spare time. However, he agreed to help adopt Grahames new mif metadata API, which we welcome as it increases reuse of code among HL7 colleagues and relieves us from having to monitor and maintain code as MIFs changes. Also, this will hopefully fill a great void which we still have in terms of processing HL7 "wrapper" structures.
      • Eric Chen (3 commits)
        • Eric Chen and Matthew Giordano had left the NCBI (NCI) group, and since then it had become quiet from them. Eric is an indepent enterpreneur now who seems to be doing a little work with our code. Gunther recently touched base with Smita Hastak for the NCBI project and it looks like they are still going to participate. NCBI had previously released a version of our code as part of their HL7/SDK alias "caAdapter".
    • With the new web site that allows easy participation outside the close HL7 community, the anonymous subversion access, online API documentation (Javadoc), and the regular zip file snapshots (including both functional binary and source code), we hope to engage more adopters in the near future. Occasionally we pick up a person who express interest.
    • In this weeks working group we had at least one attendee who came specifically for us.