Online archetype and template tools

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The openEHR 2014 roadmap meeting agreed in principle on starting a community tooling project aiming to create an open source based web-accessible archetype and template editing framework/workbench capable of ADL 2.0. The meeting report http://www.openehr.org/news_events/2014-09-16_openehr_meeting_report states that:

A next generation archetype tooling project will be commenced.

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UPDATE Oct 20, 2014:

We had a second meeting Tuesday October 21. Notes and chat available at http://www.openehr.org/wiki/x/DoAiAw The sections "Roadmap" and "Actors/developers and their interests/contributions" were updated as a result of the meeting.

UPDATE Oct 14, 2014:

Recording, chat transcript etc. from the first online meeting is now available, see: http://www.openehr.org/wiki/x/O4AYAw 

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Organisation, management and meetings

Erik Sundvall is responsible for arranging a first draft wikipage (this one) and an initial online meeting, but not necessarily the one coordinating the rest of the project. (An organization/person that can dedicate project leader time for some months would be welcome to volunteer.

A "doodle" where you can select time-preferences for 1-hour meetings is available at: http://doodle.com/gm456xavg3fcgvw5 (date alternatives ranging between Oct 14 to Oct 27) A first meeting is already finished. We might pick other times among these for followup meetings. 

Based on the doodle above (read on october 16) the most likely follow-up meeting time could be October 21 and/or October 23, the time would be the same both dates, at 12:00-13:00 Swedish (lunch) time 

Default meeting mechanism, if nothing else specified, very participant-scalable, but sometimes slightly lagging, Adobe Connect meeting room at https://connect.sunet.se/openEHR. Please try everything out before meetings so that you have audio (and possibly video) working properly. Ask a friend/colleague to log in to the room too and try talking to each other for a while. Use the audio setup wizard (see image below) to calibrate speaker/mic, it is somewhat hidden - you need to click the "meeting" button/meneu.

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Having a physical meeting was also suggested and that will hopefully be possible later for at least some participants. But we start online to be better prepared for physical meetings. Online participation possibilities during parts of physical meetings will be seriously considered.

Wiki discussion-threads can be created below using the comment function of the wiki.

Possible mailing list discussions regarding this project should initially be directed to the openEHR implementers list (if the wiki comment system below is not useful enough). Major questions, events and news should be announced on the openEHR implementers list (since we do not expect everybody to monitor the wiki). If traffic gets to intense there consider separate list.

Roadmap

• First get a rough componentization up and running (modifyable AOM-tree datastructure)
  • something that can output ADL as one of the first serialization formats in order to feed that into a backend/serverside conversion chain (based on the ADL workbench to begin with)
  • as a start it is good if the tool can read from (and write to) Git repositories
  • make sure the solution is modular and extendable so that people can build different tools, UI on top of it.
    • Seref Arikan explaind it well in the chat: I'd like to see a bottom up roadmap. Some model driven core components, parsers, AOM etc. UI and functionality can go into 100 different directions
• We should try to have AE & TD replacements by the end of 2015. Get a framework with basic editing capabilities up and running before November 2015 (hopefully a lot sooner) otherwise consider ending this project and hope that other actors step in.
• Develop ADL 1.4 migration strategy for implementers.

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• Ocean Informatics - Thomas Beale, Seref Arikan, Sebastian, Peter Gummer

  • Component architecture of new tooling

  • Tom:

    • providing webservice/rest interface to OPT generation based on AWB?

    • single file template e.g. https://github.com/openEHR/adl-archetypes/blob/master/Example/openEHR/single_file_template/templates/openEHR-EHR-COMPOSITION.t_clinical_info_ds.v1.adls

    • OPT 1.4 and OPT 2.0 should be in formal specifications

• FreshEhr (Ian McNicoll)
  • Help validate ADL2.0 -> 1.4.OPT generation
  • Explore optimal repository organisation including integration with git/githib

• Marand - Bostjan, Borut, Marko

  • Contributed ANTLR grammar and Java implementation of ADL 2.0 parser, see https://github.com/openEHR/adl2-core (perhaps in a distant future also interested in a pure javascript parser)

  • Initially acively developing/exploring/"sandboxing" and figuring out possible AOM JSON structures and serialisations - Something will be available to the community to look at in approximately 2 weeks.

  • Exploring split of serverside- vs client/editor-side components

  • Interested in getting a template designer working

  • Interested in mapping mechanisms between "at" and "id" codes (1.4 vs 2.0)

• Code24 - Sebastian Iancu

  • Experience with PHP / Sencha ExtJs

  • In the future we can provide REST API services to make conversions or validations

• DIPS - Bjorn Naess

  • Use cases and improvement suggestions compared to current tools

  • Mostly developing on .NET but have a few web developers that can be engaged

• RaySearch - TBD

  • Interested in parser implementations using Javascript

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• Linköping University and the County Council of Östergötland: Erik Sundvall (openEHR software program coordinator)

  • Drafting first wikipage, setting up first online meeting, 

  • Announcing project news via mailinglist(s)

  • Help research and test "Operational Transformation" possibilities/frameworks (for undo/redo and collaboration)

  • Interest in helping out with GUI considerations (not lead GUI development)

  • Interest in pedagogical RM-visualization (at some later stage of project when more important things already work..

• University of Auckland - Koray Atalag & Aleksandar Zivaljevic

  • Annotation tools - formal "GUI Directives" (see details below)
    
  • ...
• Samuel Frade
  • Transformations e.g. OPT -> HTML etc (both HTML trees structures and more "clinically friendly" ones)
    
• Nousco -- Dong-Won Choi
  • We have focused on ADL 1.4 because of project. 
  • 1.4 to 2.0 and vice versal most impotrant issue but still impotant in support ADL 1.4. So Need to detailed Document about APIs or Libs to faliciltate tool development. Actually too lack of formal documents & codes or APIs about tool development resources in ADL 1.4.

  • and then I think it is right to move to ADL 2.0 (of course 2.0 is important issue !)
    

Initial/potential approaches identified as interesting during & after the roadmap meeting

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The situation above works and can be compared with collaborative editing of word processor documents. Document writing can be done in off-line applications and then shared and discussed online, or in mail sent back and forth. Versioning and conflict resolution of parallel edits (merging etc) requires skill, time and patience. Compared to this, it is often a lot easier to collaborate using online realtime multi-user editor environments like https://drive.google.com/, https://writer.zoho.com/, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad 

Many of the realtime environmants include some kind of comment/discussion mechanisms (e.g. the google drive apps) and history/playback/revisioning mechanisms that also sho who did what when. (Try “Time slider” at the etherpad-based http://piratepad.net/vDW7YbIMKv document and feel free to edit/experiment).

Just creating yet another archetype editor would not be such an interesting contribution to the world, but creating a new online collaborative archetype editor that has comments and timeline/playback functions would be a nice contribution!

When Google Wave (now Apache Wave) was active, the openEHR community tried different uses for it. Follow the threads around the message http://www.openehr.org/mailarchives/openehr-clinical/msg01615.html, and read http://omowizard.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/google-wave-and-health/ (Maybe also read some search results: https://www.google.se/search?q=openehr+google+wave) These links indicate that the real-time collaboration was appreciated for capturing knowledge in pre-editing phase of archetype creation.

Google wave was extendable with collaborative gadgets/widgets for mindmapping voting etc. There were open APIs that allowed you to add your own widgets (and server side “robots”). By combining client side gadgets/widgets with server-side robots, fairly sophisticated applications could be created.

At IMT, LiU Daniel Karlsson and Erik Sundvall supervised a student project that experimented with taking the archetyping discussions in Wave a bit closer to real archetype editing by creating widgets and robots that handled real partial archetype structures. The parts that got implemented in the limited timespan worked as expected. The editing process was automatically saved in the wave and could be played back using the wave playback function. Comments and discussion threads could be mixed in between the archetype editing widgets. During the project Google announced that it would shut down Wave, and the student project prototype was not continued by any follow-up projects.

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Many real-time multi-user online collaboration tools like the ones above are based on “operational transformation” (OT). A pedagogical description of OT is available at http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applying-operational-transformation

Some interesting OT-implementation links and discussions:

• A nice OT implementation is http://sharejs.org/ 

• ...others are discussed in e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2043165/operational-transformation-library 

• In that discussion e.g. https://code.google.com/p/google-mobwrite/  looks interesting

Operational transformation can be used on text as described above, but also data structurs like on XML (as was the case in Google Wave) and JSON (e.g. as described at https://github.com/josephg/ShareJS/wiki/JSON-Operations).

The openEHR AM can of course be represented as XML or JSON. The java-ref-impl provides XML import/export but JSON could be added (Erik S started experimenting with http://jackson.codehaus.org/ to provide AM/RM conversions to JSON)

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A master thesis project or similar effort create (or explore how to create) a real-time collaborative  online archetype editor. Ideally it should be possible to run the editor both in independent/freestanding mode and embedded in other collaborative environments (e.g. Google Hangouts https://developers.google.com/+/hangouts/ or similar platforms).

The broad idea is to host both pre-archetyping discussions and actual archetyping in the same (OT-based collaborative) environment that would take over most of what is done in off-line archetype editors today, a lot of what is done in the pre-editing phase, and some steps of what is done in the CKM today.

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• Offline capacity in browser based applications is possible in modern browsers, see e.g. http://www.html5rocks.com/en/features/offline This could be used to have (all or some selected) archetypes and discussions available (read-only) when offline (e.g. when travelling). If implemented cleverly it will use HTML5 features for updating and downloading changes when reconnected.

• HTML5 offline features combined with a local instance of the server-side archetype-validation features (e.g. a small java-based server app) could be used to reduce or eliminate online server calls when editing archetypes alone. Collaborating with others that do parallel edits to the same archetype will of course re-introduce the same merging and conflict resolution problems as the off-line approach of today has.

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