FHIR Chat · Displays case sensitive? · terminology

Stream: terminology

Topic: Displays case sensitive?


view this post on Zulip Grahame Grieve (Oct 20 2021 at 21:56):

The FHIR validator is producing this message, and someone has asked me about it:

Warning: Display Name for http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/observation-category#vital-signs should be one of 'Vital Signs' instead of 'vital-signs'

I don't believe we've ever clarified whether HL7 code system displays are case sensitive or not, and therefore whether this is an appropriate warning. SCT displays are case sensitive, as are UCUM displays. More specifically, for FHIR, we'd need an extension to say something about this on a CodeSystem or a ValueSet?

view this post on Zulip Rob Hausam (Oct 20 2021 at 22:10):

This particular warning isn't just about case sensitivity - there's also the difference of ' ' vs '-'. That difference is always significant and the warning is valid, regardless of what we decide about case. I think we should always consider the displays as case-sensitive, unless there's an explicit indication otherwise. And since we don't seem to have a way to do that, possibly we need to add an extension for it.

view this post on Zulip Lloyd McKenzie (Oct 20 2021 at 22:14):

What problem would we be trying to solve by allowing displays to not be case-sensitive? Is there a reason for systems to change the case of displays (and not change anything else)?

view this post on Zulip John Moehrke (Oct 20 2021 at 22:16):

some of the formal display names are overly uppercased. Sometimes SHOUTING, sometimes Just Too Many Upper Case First Letters.

view this post on Zulip Rob Hausam (Oct 20 2021 at 22:16):

Agree with Lloyd. I'm not sure there is a good reason for it - that's why I mentioned "possibly".

view this post on Zulip John Moehrke (Oct 20 2021 at 22:17):

not a strong argument, just one that I have seen where internal copies of formal vocabulary have been made more human friendly.

view this post on Zulip Grahame Grieve (Oct 20 2021 at 22:28):

so I missed the '-' thing - thanks for pointing that out

view this post on Zulip Lloyd McKenzie (Oct 20 2021 at 22:34):

Making more "human friendly" often involves much more than just capitalization. You're free to define your own value sets that create whatever display names you like - and the validator will spit out warnings that they don't match the official ones.


Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC