Archetype Definition Language - ADL 1.2
Archetype Definition Language, or ADL, is a formal language for
expressing archetypes, and is an open
specification of the openEHR
Foundation..
The archetype concept is
described in the original paper
by Thomas Beale. Discussion about
archetypes occurs on the openEHR technical discussion list
and the Open
Source HealthCare Alliance list.
ADL is a knowledge description language. It
provides a formal, abstract syntax for describing constraints on any
domain entity whose data is described by an information model (e.g.
expressed in UML/OCL). It is primarily useful when very generic
information models are used for representing all data in a system, for
example, where the logical concepts Patient, Doctor and Hospital might
all be represented using the class Party, Address, and related generic
classes. Archetypes are then used to constrain the valid structures of instances of
these generic classes to represent the desired domain concepts. In this
way future-proof information
systems can be built - relatively simple information models and
database schemas can be defined, and archetypes supply the specific
modelling, completely outside the software.
ADL is being considered by CEN
TC/251, the European standards agency
Health Telematics Committee for use in its revised ENV 13606 Electronic
Health Record standard, and by HL7,
the US health information standards
organisation as a basis for its templates specification.
The ADL 1.2 specification is available from the openEHR Foundation