# DV_SCALE modelling discussions

**Category:** [RM](https://discourse.openehr.org/c/rm/42)
**Created:** 2020-05-29 12:32 UTC
**Views:** 1143
**Replies:** 0
**URL:** https://discourse.openehr.org/t/dv-scale-modelling-discussions/738

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## Post #1 by @ian.mcnicoll

There is  a lively discussion ongoing in the clinical community around requirments fo scales, which the recent changes on relaxing the unique value raule and introduction of DV_SCALE largely resolve.

There are 3 other requirements that have emerged..

1. 'Description' on an internal term linked to a DV_SCALE should be optional. This is universally agreed and makes a lot of sense. Quite often, especially with scores and scales,  the term Description is redundant and just adds an overhead of authoring and translation. My understanding is that this is a feature of AOM/ADL rather than DV_SCALE per-se. THe preference would be to realx the mandation for DV_SCALE only but if this was not possible, to relax universally and enforce Description to be added in tooling for DV_CODED_TEXT, and absolutely for node names.

2. There is on-going debate about some scales which for some values, do not have corresponding text term. I am much less keen on allowing term text value to be optional, even for just DV_SCALE/DV_ORDINAL  if that were possible. I'd be happy to allow a space character to be used, if that was really felt to be the safest option.

https://academic.oup.com/occmed/article/67/5/404/3975235

3. Also a suggestion that some scales do not even have a numeric value for every option and perhaps that should be optional also - I'm even more dubious about this. The only example I have seen to date is a Borg scale that has 1 to 10 then infinity - Its nuts/junk but ....

**![|503px;x326px;](upload://is2l7pFBag0Wl5CzPLw7SWd1Qyi.png)**

Actually if we just paid a hitman to take out Dr Borg, that might save us all a lot of pain ( 9 on a scale of 0 to infinity).:(

I guess me key question here is whether any of these suggestions impact on the current planned release. I do think Description (1..1) should be relaxed generally, and left to good practice/tooling.

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**Canonical:** https://discourse.openehr.org/t/dv-scale-modelling-discussions/738
**Original content:** https://discourse.openehr.org/t/dv-scale-modelling-discussions/738