AMDS Draft Schema Work

After some productive conversations with Bill and Ian from the University of Washington CoE, I've made some changes to the forthcoming May 31 draft of the AMDS schema. The changes are checked into SVN and can be viewed here (schema), here (metadata response example), here (request example), here (response example).

Please take a look and let me know your comments. This does a few things:
1) It flattens the xml structure as much as possible. Simplicity is good.
2) It allows for more fine-grained geographic regions to be selected. We now have wildcard (*) and parent qualifiers so you can stratify your result however is appropriate.
3) It adds additional, optional stratifiers of Age, Facility and Service Area (called "bucket" by BioSense). These optional stratifiers won't be supported by all AMDS services/providers/publishers but they are now in the schema to allow for it. DiSTRIBuTE supports these stratifiers.
4) Renames "condition" to "indicator" since AMDS can really be used to query and report any population indicator as definied by the AMDS provider.

I plan on using this schema for the service operations on the AMDS-BioSense beta service (due May 31).

One thing that is becoming apparent is that we will need a good registry / registry services to capture all the metadata for the indicator classifiers, age classifiers, service area classifiers, facility classifiers, etc. that are used by all of the AMDS services. I'm noting this now, but it won't be built for a while (for the typical reasons).

Finally, I'll add that this is a very DRAFT schema and will likely be updated again between now and PHIN (especially based on your comments). We will also change a lot once the science side of the house determines what standards we need to meet (Ken is working on this with the epidemiologists).