Based on a lot of experience, thinking and gnashing of teeth of colleagues Ian McNicoll, Heather Leslie, Sebastian Garde who work on the Ocean Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM) product, as well as many others using archetypes and archetype tools more generally, I have produced a major update to the openEHR Knowledge Artefact Identification specification draft, here.

Lifecycle management with semver.org versioning.

This specification is designed to answer the following needs for complex, designed artefacts like archetypes, templates and terminology subsets:

• ‘ontological’ (human readable) archetype, template and subset identifiers
• machine identifiers
• references to identified artefacts from other artefacts
• recording knowledge artefact ids in data
• lifecycle management and states;
• dealing with transfer and forking;
• supporting integrity and non-repudiation.

It combines the concept of lifecycle management for knowledge artefacts with a solid versioning model, mostly lifted from the excellent specification at semver.org.

I have taken a lot of care to ensure this specification works equally well with artefacts produced by other organisations, particular non-openEHR archetypes and similar models. It now needs community input and feedback… i.e. feel free to pull it to pieces.