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FYP Final Report v1.0.0
Copyright and All Rights Reserved To: Pee-Lo Team @2003/04
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2.3 Project Scopes
Our project scopes will be focusing on how to address the four problem statements that we have
identified. The project scopes are tailored to achieve a proof of concept of our solution. We are
going to focus more on the wireless access implementation of our proposed solution. In other
words, we are going to design a working prototype that functions on PDAs.
2.3.1 Dealing with Data Representation
To make data widely available and standardized, we propose the use of Extensible Markup
Language (XML). XML is designed to improve the functionality of the Web by providing more
flexible and adaptable information identification.
It is called extensible because it is not a fixed format like HTML (a single, predefined markup
language). Instead, XML is actually a Meta language — a language for describing other languages
— which lets the developer designs their own customized markup languages for limitless different
types of documents. XML can do this because it's written in Standard Generalized Markup
Language (ISO 8879:1985) or SGML; the international standard Meta language for text markup
systems (ISO 8879).
In our context, we can design a markup language using XML for unifying how health care data is
being represented. Certain health care centers around America, Europe and Australasia have
been using Health Level 7 (HL7) for intra-department communications. HL7 is a messaging
protocol specifically developed to exchange health/medical/patient information between information
systems. HL7 messaging is widely used with in Hospitals and Medical Organizations in the USA,
Europe, and Australasia. HL7 is endorsed as a standard by the American National Standards
Institutes (ANSI) [1].
HL7 is useful for intra-department communication; which means servers in one department
communicate with another server at another department to obtain data, process it and show it on
screen for the physicians. HL7 is good enough for intra-department communication but not for
anything more than that.
We will use a standard XML schema to represent data to proof our concept of unified data
representation is feasible.
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