Endorsement for the use of ISO 11179 for use of a HISO Guideline - Approved Standards - Standards - Health Information Strategy Advisory Committee

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Endorsement for the use of ISO 11179 for use of a HISO Guideline
Published February 2004

Specification of data elements, the basic units of data, involves documenting relevant characteristics of each data element to ensure its representation of the item is consistent and accurate. Data that has been carefully specified and standardised greatly enhances its usefulness and shareability across systems and environments. Uniform specification of data facilitates data retrieval, data exchange, and consistent use of data throughout the Software Development Life Cycle.

Data must not only be adequately described, users must have a convenient way to obtain these descriptions, for example, from a Data Element Registry. Data Element Registries provide a way to organise the content and representation of data elements so that data descriptions are consistently specified and can be easily located by data designers and users.

The primary data sharing and standardisation problems in New Zealand include, but are not limited to the following

there is a lack of uniform guidance for identification, development, and description of data elements
while data is sometimes standardised within an organisation, there are few common data standards between organisations
data definitions and descriptions are not sufficiently precise to support reuse or multiple users of data; as a result, documentation of data element characteristics is inadequate to support fully automated sharing of data, including locating, retrieving, and exchanging the data
there is no universal means for organising standard data elements, including a lack of unique national identifiers for standard data elements, and mechanisms for enabling national data acquisition and interchange, particularly across application areas, are poor; as a result, finding and retrieving a specific standard data element is difficult.

The problems above are not unique to New Zealand. The ISO/IEC 11179 international standard is intended to give concrete guidance on the formulation and maintenance of discrete data element descriptions and semantic content (metadata) that should be used to formulate data elements in a consistent, standard manner. It also provides guidance for establishing a data element registry.
Specifically ISO/IEC 11179:

a. facilitates acquisition and registration of data

b. expedites access and use of data

c. simplifies data manipulation by intelligent software by enabling manipulation of data based on characteristics described by metadata

d. enables the development of a data representation metamodel for repositories

e. facilitates electronic data interchange and data sharing

In addition, ISO/IEC 11179 benefits the communication of data among information systems and people:

a. within an organisation

b. among different organisations

c. crossing all levels of software and hardware, and geographic, organisational and political boundaries.

Data elements that have been formulated according to the principles in this multi-part International Standard enable interchangeability and retrieval regardless of the information processing system or telecommunication protocols employed.

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