UK Gov Codelist Requirements

["Paul Spencer" <paul.spencer@boynings.co.uk>]

As requested at today's telecon, these are the requirements extracted from
my position paper on codelists that was recently uploaded.

Support long-term archiving of documents
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Many documents require long-term archiving. To achieve this, the documents
must be able to indicate the version of a code set that is in use. They
should do this both in the code list reference in the instance document (so
the correct set is accessed) and in any document metadata (so that the code
list(s) required can be archived with the document).

Versioning
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A code list must indicate its version number. It may also provide dates
between which it is valid. A reference to a code list must indicate the
version to which it refers.

Looking up Code Meanings
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It must be possible to find the meaning of any code in the code set.

Multiple definitions (e.g. short and long)
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The mechanism used for holding code sets must support multiple definitions.
Specifically, it must be possible to hold both a short description, a long
description and a symbol (with information on the correct positioning of the
symbol relative to the value).

Multi-lingual
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The mechanism used for holding code sets must support extracting information
in multiple languages.

Must be able to carry both a code and (optional) value in the message
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A requirement in the health service (and possibly elsewhere) is that both a
code and a meaning can be carried in a document. As an example of the use of
this, if a person selects a value from a drop-down list on a web page, the
text selected as well as a code describing it must be transmitted to health
systems for audit purposes, even though the receiving application might
ignore the text and use the indicated code list to look up a meaning.

These are the main requirements, and so the most important part. The rest of
the document goes into detail including proposing a syntax.

Regards

Paul Spencer
Director
Boynings Consulting Ltd
http://www.boynings.co.uk