Thomas Beale wrote: > > Louis, > > Implied in your post is the idea that pure dates do indeed have > timezones. Do you agree that this is the case in ISO8601? If so, then I > think it is better if all date/time types have a timezone. >
I certainly do not speak for Louis but have been meaning to take time to comment on this issue. I wish I could support my argument with a 'solid' example. :-) All I can say is that, I can imagine an instance (and it only takes one to break a model) where a person is traveling from Los Angles to Sydney and has just had an injection of some type before leaving LA. They get to Sydney and seem to be having a reaction and are taken to the Emergency Dept. Since we have this really cool world wide accessible electronic health record, the staff gains proper authority and reviews the patient's treatment before leaving LA. Do they instantly know the time difference between LA and Sydney? There must be a universal reference point if we are to envision world wide access to a single record (virtual or physical) for care and health tracking. Given the fact that there are known duplicates in the abbreviations used in timezones the offset to UTC should be used as a five character string; -0600 or +1000 etc. This also accomodates the various DST rollovers also. Cheers, -- Tim Cook http://www.OpenParadigms.com 731.884.4126 - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
