Digital Signing in openEHR

Notes on digital signatures in openEHR.

Canonical Format 

In order to support digital singing of compositions, a canonical format for a composition instance must be specified.

This could be something like "use the XML ITS format" - though this would still be ambiguous - a canonical representation of the XML would need to be chosen.

Alternatively, a very simple "canonical ITS" could be written that has no ambiguity (perhaps a simple hierarchy format like JSON, YAML etc - I don't think these are per-se particularly suitable but maybe something similar could be specified).

The format which I currently prefer  is still the dADL syntax from ADL, since it gives an unambigous serialisation of any object structure. We have this already working inside the Eiffel ADL parser. - thomas beale

Enter labels to add to this page:
Please wait 
Looking for a label? Just start typing.

Comments (1)

 

  1. 16-May-2008

    Erik Sundvall says:

    If the canonical format is primarily intended for machine readability and digita...

    If the canonical format is primarily intended for machine readability and digital signatures, then JSON is probably a good choice due to it's:

    1. simplicity (that gives both fast generation at runtime and simple implementation at design time) and
    2. wide support in programming languages

    Designing a YAML ITS for openEHR would be a good thing also (for other purposes - perhaps e.g. long time archival of EHRs), but for use in digital signatures I'd suggest using JSON.