Dear Open Health Readers, many years ago, I started coding on the http://www.resmedicinae.org open source project, at that time in Java.
I investigated software patterns and found the Apache-Jakarta-Avalon project using Component Oriented Programming (COP), the Scope project being based on the Hierarchical Model View Controller (HMVC) pattern and many more. The ideas of these projects helped me a lot to receive clean source code. I then realised a few weaknesses like redundant interfaces with COP, but also found new ideas like the forwarding of just one parameter (knowledge tree) to all procedures, comparable to the forwarding of a biological DNA from cell to cell. Then I realised that not only the HMVC View and Controllers, but also the Model and actually all objects are hierarchical, so that I decided to introduce a hierarchical top-level root container class for the whole framework. It directly inherited from java.lang.Object, but the problem was that standard Java classes did not inherit from my root class :-( So I factored out all domain knowledge from Java source code and put it into external XML files, which are now called CYBOL files. It was the idea of ontological structures (pure hierarchy of objects grouped into layers/ levels by their granularity, with only unidirectional relations between layers) that helped me here. And it was Thomas Beale's freely published design document back in 2001 where I first read about the idea of ontological structures. And so on and so on ... After five years, I finally managed to put my ideas into a book, which I would like to announce to the readers of this list, because I was greatly influenced by their discussions. Many of our free medical software projects are mentioned, some developers cited, a short overview of medical standards is given. Thomas Beale and OpenEHR, for example, are acknowledged and compared to CYBOP. Here is the book: http://cybop.berlios.de/books/cybop/index.html It is published under the GNU FDL license. The link also includes order information. There are only 500 pieces left ;-) The CYBOP concepts, language and interpreter described in the book will become the basis of the "Res Medicinae" project, which will be entirely written in CYBOL (XML). Thanks, Christian Heller, Dr.-Ing. (PhD)
