Marc de Graauw - Random Notes

Last week Monday I gave a presentation on XML 2007 titled “Implementing Healthcare Messaging with XML” for a very attentive and responsive audience, chaired by Tony Coates. David Orchard and Glen Daniels of multiple WS-standards were there, and I had an interesting chat with them afterwards on the layering problems of WSDL mentioned in my presentation. Jon Bosak inquired about ebXML - which we hadn’t used because it did not seem to get any traction from IBM and Microsoft at the time. With hindsight, looking at what ebXML (ebMS specifically) delivered years ago and the time the WS-* stack took, one wonders whether this was such a wise decision… Anyway, it was great to have such a responsive crowd.

I’ve written a new version of ‘Axioms of Versioning‘. I extended the formalization to get a grasp of the concept of ‘Semantic Backward Compatibility in HL7v3, which I believe is flawed (quote: “Objective of backward model compatibility is that a receiver expecting an ‘old’ version will not misinterpret content sent from a new version”). It seems to be the reverse of the position of the W3C TAG in ‘Extending and Versioning Languages: Terminology‘, and the position I would defend myself. Yet the interaction of new senders with old receivers was not sufficiently explored in my Axioms.

It turns out that exploration of this notion leads to quite natural definitions of ‘may ignore’ and ‘must understand’ semantics. The HL7v3 notion is probably best characterized by the concept of ‘partial semantical forward compatibility’ in my new Axioms. The concept is also close to, if not the same as, the TAG’s ‘Partial Understanding‘.

It really thrilled me to see how helpful my formalisms were in exploring the notions in HL7v3, and uncovering the - I think - hidden meaning in it.