Re: [rights-requirements] HIPAA, HL7 and general questions

[Bob Glushko <glushko@SIMS.Berkeley.EDU>]

This is too important a comment not to respond in support of
Robin Cover.


At 08:03 PM 8/21/2002 -0500, Robin Cover wrote:

> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> "An assignment of initial representatives was made. The
> following
> final list was agreed upon by the Requirements SC:
>
> 1. MPEG ("Motion Picture Expert Group") -
> BG

I know this is what the minutes of the meeting say, but I don't think
that "final" really meant final.  Granted, Hari probably
wrote these minutes in a state of "irrational exuberance"
because he's got the job of moving things along, but throughout the
summer he and the rest of the committee have demonstrated a willingness
to solicit requirements from other organizations as we identified them as
potential stakeholders and we've accepted requirements "out of the
blue" from organizations who identified us without any help.  I
don't think there has been any sinister attempt to exclude anyone from
participating.  

The problem is simply that it takes time to engage the appropriate
organizations and for their internal schedules to reach a point where
they can pay attention to us.  I've tried all summer to get UBL
engaged with us but have failed simply because they've spent most of the
last two months in getting a significant new release out
themselves.  UBL has obvious and important overlaps with the scope
of our work.  But you can't expect them to drop their own work
because we are impatient.

So  I completely share Robin's concerns that this  TC is overly
fixated with schedule at the expense of getting complete requirements,
and that our failure to adequately engage the HL7/HIPAA constituency is a
serious one.  There is no way that the TC can claim to be creating a
comprehensive rights expression language without their input.  
I also agree that the withdrawal of the XBRL camp puts us in a weaker
position when we try to convince the OASIS membership to approve our work
as a standard.  

Now if we were developing some narrow vertical specification -- like so
many of the OASIS TCs -- it wouldn't matter so much. But most of us
believe that the core expression language is supposed to be "the
mother of all rights expression languages" that, when extended, will
be usable by all the "domain" languages.  We can't
plausibly claim that if we don't get requirements from healthcare and
financial services, two of the most important domains.  Telling them
"we'll get to you in future versions of the spec" isn't
credible.  We'll get voted down by the broader membership.

> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Liora seemed to suggest that if this domain were to be considered as to
> its rights-language requirements, one would need to go through HIPAA
> specs and the HL7 RIM (Reference Information Model) to make sure the
> underlying requirements in the data models were accounted for in the
> RLTC requirements specification.  So one might ask: can we do this
> job 
> at this point, or would it actually make more sense for Liora to do
> this
> job once there's a draft requirements document to
> inspect?

Liora is a member of OASIS because of the reciprocity agreement it has
with HL7. I recommend that we invite her to join our TC, at least for a
few weeks, so that she lead this evaluation and insertion of the
HL7/HIPAA requirements into our set.   We simply don't have
anyone in the requirements team now with the expertise to do this. 

This would ensure that we'd be credible when we published our
requirements for external review. We should do the same with XBRL -- I
know that Zac Coffin has withdrawn from the TC, so we need to beg him to
come back or to find someone to take his place. 

bob