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Re: [Gnumed-devel] Normcurves, again
From: |
Christof Meigen |
Subject: |
Re: [Gnumed-devel] Normcurves, again |
Date: |
19 Jul 2002 15:58:35 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/21.1 |
Hi Karsten and others,
[Richard Terry:]
> > pardon my ignorance but how to I get these
> > two files to 'run' or do something
> > so I can comment?
The .DTD is commented and should be human-readable It's a "document
type definition" which defines a certain type of XML-documents, here:
XML documents which contain medical normcurves. the file testnorm.xml
is a sample for how such a file looks like.
>From the DTD it is pretty obvious how a normcurve must look
like. There are certain things I left out, like
-> "Ethnic" parameters as sometimes provided in the US
I couln't think of a resonable and pc way to do it,
and "race-mixing" makes this questionable anyway.
Instead a Country Code is provided.
-> Normcurves for patients with certain diseases,
for example Turner-girls. We don't need that here
in Leipzig, but maybe you do? Raise your hand.
-> Super-fancy stuff I've nerver heard of,
like strange distributions of values (other than
(skew)normal), three-dimensional growth charts
....
Other things are in there, for example the possibility to enter
normcurves with an X-Axis other than age (like in "weight for
height"-charts for babies) or the possibility to use smooth splines
instead of some fixed values for some ages. Maybe no one needs that?
Once there is a - more or less - consensus about what should be in it
and what not, I'll start to port my Java and C-Routines to Python to
provide a way to actually _use_ the norms within GnuMed.
> Christof is thinking that in some offices there may not be a
> server or if there is there may not be a Linux server
> worthy capable of safely running PostgreSQL. Therefor
> he wants to store reference data in XML files.
Uh, no. While indeed this opinon came up during our discussion, it was
raised by Torsten Menzel, not me. I wouln't want to change the way
GnuMed saves its patient data etc.
Norm curves, however, seem to me more like some kind of "configuration
file". I chose XML because
- It's standard. It's well structured.
- It's text. You can send it via Email or download it from
the web and you immedialtly have it ready to use.
As mentioned, I imagine that gnumed.org may provide
a normcurve-search-engine (for example, when you as a physician
have some new vietnamese patients, cou can look up
normcurves for them). With XML, you can simply output
the XML-stuff and say "copy and paste this into your
normcurve-file". When the normcurves are stored
in a database, things become more complicated.
- In Python, there is a built-in parser for XML
- It can be used outside of GnuMed, for example by researchers,
who still lack a standard format for normcurve-interchange
Furthermore normcurves don't fit well into an relational databese
scheme, while they can be naturally expressed in XML.
Still, if the most of the GnuMed people think a SQL-based storage
scheme would fit better into the "philosophy" of GnuMed, I'd also do
it that way.
Christof