Report of June X3L8 Special Interest Group Meeting
Meeting Report
National Committee for Information Technology Standards, L8, Special Interest Group
Held at Battelle
June 18 & 19, 1997
Attendees:Bruce Bargmeyer, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Phil Diamond, Veterans Administration
Larry Fitzwater, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Henry Heffernan, EDPNS
Douglas Mann, Battelle
John McCarthy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Judith Newton, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Phong Ngo, Science Applications International Corporation
Frank Olken, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Burton Parker, Paladin Integration Engineering
Judith Newton chaired the meeting. The following reports the issues raised and decisions made:
1. JTC 1 Issues
The JTC 1 ballot on the new Title and Scope for SC 14 is complete. There were 11 yes votes, 2
no votes and 1 abstention. The results have been passed to the JTC 1 Ad Hoc meeting on
reengineering.
The JTC 1 Ad Hoc on Reengeneering requested responses to JTC1 N 463, which laid out
possible new "Technical Directions" that would recombine various parts of existing JTC 1
Subcommittees. At the last SIG, we prepared a draft response for a contribution from SC 14.
The draft was circulated via the SC-14 email reflector and Ronny Elofsson, of the SC 14
Secretariat, received input that it was acceptable. He forwarded the response to JTC 1 for
consideration at the next Ad Hoc meeting.
2. Status of work items
a. ISO/IEC 11179 Part 2 -- nothing back from the JTC1 CD ballot yet.
b. Data Element Concept attribution - nothing back from the JTC1 ballot yet.
c. Metamodel for the Management of Shareable Data -- Doug Mann has redrawn the model,
minus the data composite structure. The data composite structure will be replaced by a structure
for derived data, including data composites. Doug has also redrawn the primary diagram for the
document in the extended Peter Chen ERD notation. He has also prepared appendices that redraw
the model in IDEF1x, and NIAM. Doug has an Object Management Technology (OMT) version
underway. Doug has also reworked the structure of the description of the model. See more
below, under the metamodel agenda item.
d. Value domain New Work Item -- This passed it's JTC 1 ballot. Judy will prepare a new version
based on comments she has received. She will contact Ronnie Elofsson at the SC14 Secretariat to
see how to most rapidly progress this document. One extension of the document will be to handle
structured value domains such as taxonomies. We would like to ballot the document for CD in
time to review it at the next SC14 meeting.
e. Date standard X3.50 and Time standard X3L8/97-008gV4, combining X3.51 with X3.43
Burt Parker reported the Status of the Date and Time standards. The date standard passed its final
X3L8 ballot. Phong Ngo forwarded the Date standard to ITI for final processing. The Time
standard passed an L8 ballot and was sent by Phong to ANSI for public review. The deadline is
unknown at this time.
3. Future work and related standards activities
Henry Heffernan reported that last week the Healthcare Information Standards Board decided to
pursue creation of an ISO committee for healthcare informatics. The US delegation is "formally"
neutral on whether to create an industry specific ISO Technical Committee or to create a
Subcommittee under JTC 1. However, there is considerable controversy over this. There will be
a meeting this fall where standards activities can present their work that may be of potential use
for healthcare informatics. L8 standards should have considerable utility for healthcare. He
described several efforts underway--such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)
controlled word list--that are related to the L8 work. Henry also brought in several articles to help
us better understand classification and terminology issues. These articles are a very rich resource
of descriptive material describing the state-of-the-art.
It is highly desirable to work together with organizations already involved in development of
terminology and classification schemes. Henry suggests that it may be possible to engage these
efforts by beginning development of a technical report which shows the utility of L8 standards for
healthcare informatics. Another approach would be to request a meeting with healthcare
informatics folks requesting their input on possible approaches and methods for inclusion of better
terminology management in L8 style data registries. We will try to pursue this.
Tom Kurihara has organized an ARPA/EPA/NIST sponsored meeting on terminology issues
involved in data and knowledge interchange. It will be held July 29, 1997. An announcement will
be sent out soon.
4. Workshop on Metadata Registration
Frank Olken and John McCarthy reported on preparations for the Workshop on Metadata Registration to be held July 8 - 12, 1997 at Berkeley, California. There will be about 55 participants. Speakers and most Work Group chairs are confirmed. Some of the panel speakers are yet to be confirmed. A list showing tentative assignment of participants to Work Groups is complete. We reviewed the assignment of X3L8 members. Communications and many other arrangements are completed or underway. See the Workshop home page for details:
http://www.lbl.gov/~olken/EPA/Workshop/
5. Metamodel for the Management of Shareable Data, dpANS X3.258
Doug lead us through the redrawn model and we discussed various details. Doug has also broken
the model down into segments covering major topics such as: stewardship, naming and
identification, conceptual and value domain administration, and concept administration. He
prepared diagrams for each section and is attaching text descriptions for each topic. We examined
several issues and made some revisions in the metamodel.
6. Registry issues
Much of the meeting was spent exploring issues raised by the EPA reference implementation of
ISO/IEC 11179 and the L8 Metamodel. Joe Leahy led the discussion. Joe used a projection unit
and Internet connection to raise and demonstrate issues. The discussion focused on the metadata
content of the registry. We discussed quality control issues. A quality metric is needed for each
attribute in the Metamodel. These are currently lacking. We will need to devise them. Several
metamodel issues arose and we suggested some changes, such as making it possible to record
definitions within "context", just as is currently done for names. Joe recorded suggestions for
improvement.
12. Future meeting schedule
Workshop on Metadata Registration, July 8-11, 1997 at UC Berkeley, California
Joint X3L8 - X3T2 meeting, August 14 & 15, Seattle. Meeting place to be announced
X3L8 SIG meeting 9 AM, September 25 & 26, 1997 at NIST, Administration Building, Lecture room C
X3L8 SIG and Plenary meetings 9 AM, October 22-24, 1997, Battelle
X3L8 SIG and Plenary meetings, February 18-20, 1988 at ITI
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X3L8 documents, including this meeting report, are available via Anonymous FTP from speckle.ncsl.nist.gov. Log in as anonymous, use your email address for a password, Change directory to X3L8 (X3L8 in lowercase letters). Read the "readme" file for a listing of filenames and a brief description of each file. Many of the X3L8 and SC14 documents are also listed on the X3L8 Home Page http://www.lbl.gov/~olken/X3L8