Dear all,
while working recently with the group at Dr Peter Elkin's Laboratory of Biomedical Informatics at the Mayo Clinic, MN, we succeeded in wrapping the openEHR ADL parser for use in Java environments. Thanks to Raju Kalidindi and Russ Hamm for their participation and patience in this exercise. This work is part of a larger project to connect ADL archetypes with the OWL knowledge environment in use at Mayo. Further results of this work will be forthcoming.
In the initial version, we have not exposed that many functions, solely for the reason that we have not done the documentation. However, we thought it useful to release a cut now, since it will give Java developers a chance to test that the DLL works. At the moment, it can be used to parse any ADL file, provide the error status of the parse, and serialise the archetype to another form, such as HTML. Soon, there will be a basic OWL serialiser. The exported interface can be understood by reading the AdlJniWrapper.java file, or the .h file in the archive (whichever takes your fancy;-), and the Java test class gives a reasonable idea of how to use the exported functions (which are more or less self-explanatory). The DLL has been tested with Sun JDK 1.5 beta running under Eclipse (although you don't need Eclipse - just use whatever IDE you normally use) on Windows XP and 2000.
The download page is at http://www.openehr.org/repositories/implem-dev/latest/distribution/tools/windows/adl_tools_index.html.
In the next release of this, we will fill out the exposed interface to allow building of complete archetypes in memory from Java.
When resources become available, we will generate equivalent .so libraries for use on Linux and the Mac. Or someone can offer to do that for the community;-)
For those who need a reminder of what ADL is all about, see http://www.openehr.org/tmp/adl-1_2_draft_d.pdf.
All feedback welcome.
- thomas beale
