note: I am using Liaison EDI notepad for syntax error checking.
For EDI processing there are a lot of places where you can use 'ZZ=mutually defined' as a value. For instance, I am working with creating an 810 4010 document, and for BIG07 (transaction type code) none of the codes that I can choose are the ones I want. I want my customers to use codes that I create. I want them to use the code 'HR' for human resource or 'SC' for supply chain. So can someone tell me how I can do this? And also what does 'ZZ=mutually defined' in Liaison EDI notepad mean?
First, make sure you want and need to do this. "Human Resource" and "Supply Chain" don't really sound like credible invoice types and you risk just annoying the trading partners with such a deviation. There are several hundred valid codes already.
How exactly do you plan to use this? Maybe there is a better way, like the NTE segment which kind of a catch-all already.
ZZ is not a Liaison specific qualifer. ZZ means mutually defined per the ANSI X12 standard. It's kind of a "catch all" where the trading partners can agree that ZZ will suit their needs because the other codes might not necessarily apply. It's used a lot of times in the ISA where a trading partner will arbitrarily make up their identifier instead of using a phone number or DUNS number.
Besides Google, there are a few resources out there like give you a high level of how EDI works. I'm assuming BizTalk doesn't provide you with a solid X12 dictionary viewer, so perhaps you might want to purchase the Dictionary Viewer from Liaison. You might want to check out http://www.edibasics.com/
You need to check with your customers to see if they can even provide what you're looking for. If not, you're just wasting your time. If you're going to bastardize the standard (which is not uncommon) it doesn't mean your partner is going to jump through the hoops to give you what you want. It might not be feasible on their end, and you could wind up irritating your customer. Irritating a customer is never a good idea. On their end, it is possible that an invoice is an invoice and they can't differentiate between the two. Or, they might be able to differentiate by an invoice number prefix or suffix. Then your mapping logic can use that.
Related
I want to generate QR codes to pass a unique alpha-numeric code to a site. The QR will be generated from a string like:
https://example.com/ABCD1234
The ABCD1234 is the unique code and there will be ~100 million of them. Can I be sure no two QR codes will be the same, and be read to 100% accuracy?
Anything to watch out for standards wise?
100% is too pure of a number to get specific advice. This reply is general, and not meant for any super mission critial needs.
The clarity of barcodes in general depends on the quality of the printed image, as well as the reader's ability to decode (optics and decoder). QR codes have some error correction attributes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code). Commercial decoders, even for webcams, are used widely for consumer and retail applications.
Keep in mind, barcodes were designed for reading labels quickly, and often while moving. They are not well suited for things like security codes, where deep levels of checks are needed. It is possible for things to go wrong.
Given that, it really depends on what you mean by 100%. The barcode symbology cannot make many guarantees, but the content might begin to. If your line-of-business app is mildly mission critical, and your app can control what's printed on labels, and the http address is to 'your' line-of-business web site, you could append a check value within the content, in the QR code printed. For example, ~https://example.com/ABC1234?check=5551212, has a check value which the web site can optionally verify. However, the more content you have, the more dense the printed pattern will get (and possibly more difficult to read).
I am wondering if anyone has ever tried to work on the following issue. I need to execute a series of test on a remote DICOM Q/R server. This would allow some easy DICOM Conformance Statement checking.
As an implementation detail of the test suite, I am running the following (DCMTK style command):
$ findscu --study --cancel 1 --key 0020,0010=* --key 8,52=STUDY --aetitle MINE --call THEIR dicom.example.com 11112
The goal here is to find a valid StudyID (later on I'll use that StudyID to execute lower key level C-FIND, and some related C-MOVE queries). Of course it would be much easier if I could upload my own dataset and try to fetch it back, but I cannot do that against a running PACS in a clinical environment. I need to define with a minimal number of queries how to find a valid StudyID.
However I fear that some DICOM implementation may have policies where quering the entire database is forbidden.
So I was wondering if anyone has written a list of those policies, and maybe describe a way to retrieve a valid StudyID from a remote server with a minimal number of C-FIND queries.
I think I may simply go with:
TODAY=`date +"%Y%m%d"`
findscu --study --key 0008,0020="$TODAY-" --key 0020,0010=* --key 8,52=STUDY --aetitle MINE --call THEIR dicom.example.com 11112
If this does not work (return empty), I'll check yesterday results.
Welcome to DICOM-wonderland.
You are right that you should be very, very, very, very careful to run just random queries on a clinical PACS. I've seen commercial PACses send their whole(!) database as a result of a query which it did not understand. Not a pretty sight. This (and privacy) is one of the reasons that in a lot of hospitals around the world PACS admins are very afraid of giving direct access to their PACS via DICOM.
In general I would say that standardization is not going to help you. So you have to find something which works for you, and which will not get bring the PACS down. No guarantees here.
Just a list of observations from querying PACSes in hospitals:
Some are case sensitive in their matching, some are not.
Most support some kind of wild card. This normally is a '*'. but I've also seen '%' (since that is a SQL wildcard, and the query is just passed as a SQL string). This is not well-defined I think.
The list you will get back might be limited to say the first 500 entries. Or 1000. Or random number between 500 and 1000. Or the whole PACS. You just don't know.
DICOM and cancellation do not play well. Cancelling a query is not implemented well. Normally a PACS sees it as a failed transfer, and will retry after some time. And the retry-queue is limited in size, so it might ignore new queries. So always let your STORE-SCP server running to drain this queue.
Sometimes queries take minutes, especially for retrieve. The next time it might have been retrieved (from tape?) and be fast for a while.
A DICOM query may take a lot of resources from the PACS, depending on the PACS. Don't be suprised if a PACS admin shows up if you experiment a little too much.
The queries supported differ very much. Only basic queries are supported by all: list of patients, list of studyID/study instanceuid for patients, list of series per study, retrieve study or series. Unless you get a funky research department which uses Osirix, which does not support patient-level queries but only study-level-queries.
So what I would advise if you want to have something working on any random PACS:
Use empty-return-key instead of '*'. This is the DICOM way to retrieve information.
Do not use '-cancel'. If you really need to cancel, just close the TCP connection (not supported in DCMTK)
Use a query on PatientId, PatientName, Birthdate, StudyDate to get a list of StudyIDs/StudyInstanceUids.
The simplest is just use a fixed StudyID, assuming that it stays in the PACS long enough. If not, think of a limiting query to not overload the PACS (the 'TODAY' suggestion of you fitted that description).
Good luck!
I have a connection to an EDI clearinghouse to whom I send X12 270 documents using BizTalk 2009. The "Information Source" for these 270s can be either of two depending on a variety of factors. For one Information Source, the clearinghouse requires one value in my GS02, and for the other, they require a different GS02 value.
I see that I can set up multiple entries in my Party Management for the 270, but I do not know how to make the send port know which entry to use.
Has anyone else run into this?
If so, is there a way to do this dynamically, or do I need some other work-around?
Late answer, but replying to the question for the sake of others looking for the answer by searching first.
Look into the property EdiOverride.GS02 as part of Microsoft.BizTalk.Edi.BaseArtifacts
You only need one party and then filter on the GS02 property at the send port.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/biztalkediandas2/thread/09869a35-f90e-4ca7-9ddd-34c03127710d
I apologize as I don't know whether this is more of a math question that belongs on mathoverflow or if it's a computer science question that belongs here.
That said, I believe I understand the fundamental difference between data, information, and knowledge. My understanding is that information carries both data and meaning. One thing that I'm not clear on is whether information is data. Is information considered a special kind of data, or is it something completely different?
The words data,information and knowlege are value-based concepts used to categorize, in a subjective fashion, the general "conciseness" and "usefulness" of a particular information set.
These words have no precise meaning because they are relative to the underlying purpose and methodology of information processing; In the field of information theory these have no meaning at all, because all three are the same thing: a collection of "information" (in the Information-theoric sense).
Yet they are useful, in context, to summarize the general nature of an information set as loosely explained below.
Information is obtained (or sometimes induced) from data, but it can be richer, as well a cleaner (whereby some values have been corrected) and "simpler" (whereby some irrelevant data has been removed). So in the set theory sense, Information is not a subset of Data, but a separate set [which typically intersects, somewhat, with the data but also can have elements of its own].
Knowledge (sometimes called insight) is yet another level up, it is based on information and too is not a [set theory] subset of information. Indeed Knowledge typically doesn't have direct reference to information elements, but rather tells a "meta story" about the information / data.
The unfounded idea that along the Data -> Information -> Knowledge chain, the higher levels are subsets of the lower ones, probably stems from the fact that there is [typically] a reduction of the volume of [IT sense] information. But qualitatively this info is different, hence no real [set theory] subset relationship.
Example:
Raw stock exchange data from Wall Street is ... Data
A "sea of data"! Someone has a hard time finding what he/she needs, directly, from this data. This data may need to be normalized. For example the price info may sometimes be expressed in a text string with 1/32th of a dollar precision, in other cases prices may come as a true binary integer with 1/8 of a dollar precision. Also the field which indicate, say, the buyer ID, or seller ID may include typos, and hence point to the wrong seller/buyer. etc.
A spreadsheet made from the above is ... Information
Various processes were applied to the data:
-cleaning / correcting various values
-cross referencing (for example looking up associated codes such as adding a column to display the actual name of the individual/company next to the Buyer ID column)
-merging when duplicate records pertaining to the same event (but say from different sources) are used to corroborate each other, but are also combined in one single record.
-aggregating: for example making the sum of all transaction value for a given stock (rather than showing all the individual transactions.
All this (and then some) turned the data into Information, i.e. a body of [IT sense] Information that is easily usable, where one can quickly find some "data", such as say the Opening and Closing rate for the IBM stock on June 8th 2009.
Note that while being more convenient to use, in part more exact/precise, and also boiled down, there is not real [IT sense] information in there which couldn't be located or computed from the original by relatively simple (if only painstaking) processes.
An financial analyst's report may contain ... knowledge
For example if the report indicate [bogus example] that whenever the price of Oil goes past a certain threshold, the value of gold start declining, but then quickly spikes again, around the time the price of coffee and tea stabilize. This particular insight constitute knowledge. This knowledge may have been hidden in the data alone, all along, but only became apparent when one applied some fancy statistically analysis, and/or required the help of a human expert to find or confirm such patterns.
By the way, in the Information Theory sense of the word Information, "data", "information" and "knowlegde" all contain [IT sense] information.
One could possibly get on the slippery slope of stating that "As we go up the chain the entropy decreases", but that is only loosely true because
entropy decrease is not directly or systematically tied to "usefulness for human"
(a typical example is that a zipped text file has less entropy yet is no fun reading)
there is effectively a loss of information (in addition to entropy loss)
(for example when data is aggregate the [IT sense] information about individual records get lost)
there is, particular in the case of Information -> Knowlege, a change in level of abstration
A final point (if I haven't confused everybody yet...) is the idea that the data->info->knowledge chain is effectively relative to the intended use/purpose of the [IT-sense] Information.
ewernli in a comment below provides the example of the spell checker, i.e. when the focus is on English orthography, the most insightful paper from a Wallstreet genius is merely a string of words, effectively "raw data", some of it in need of improvement (along the orthography purpose chain.
Similarly, a linguist using thousands of newspaper articles which typically (we can hope...) contain at least some insight/knowledge (in the general sense), may just consider these articles raw data, which will help him/her create automatically French-German lexicon (this will be information), and as he works on the project, he may discover a systematic semantic shift in the use of common words betwen the two languages, and hence gather insight into the distinct cultures.
Define information and data first, very carefully.
What is information and what is data is very dependent on context. An extreme example is a picture of you at a party which you email. For you it's information, but for the the ISP it's just data to be passed on.
Sometimes just adding the right context changes data to information.
So, to answer you question: No, information is not a subset of data. It could be at least the following.
A superset, when you add context
A subset, needle-in-a-haystack issue
A function of the data, e.g. in a digest
There are probably more situations.
This is how I see it...
Data is dirty and raw. You'll probably have too much of it.
... Jason ... 27 ... Denton ...
Information is the data you need, organised and meaningful.
Jason.age=27
Jason.city=Denton
Knowledge is why there are wikis, blogs: to keep track of insights and experiences. Note that these are human (and community) attributes. Except for maybe a weird science project, no computer is on Facebook telling people what it believes in.
information is an enhancement of data:
data is inert
information is actionable
note that information without data is merely an opinion ;-)
Information could be data if you had some way of representing the additional content that makes it information. A program that tries to 'understand' written text might transform the input text into a format that allows for more complex processing of the meaning of that text. This transformed format is a kind of data that represents information, when understood in the context of the overall processing system. From outside the system it appears as data, whereas inside the system it is the information that is being understood.
I've been playing with RSS feeds this week, and for my next trick I want to build one for our internal application log. We have a centralized database table that our myriad batch and intranet apps use for posting log messages. I want to create an RSS feed off of this table, but I'm not sure how to handle the volume- there could be hundreds of entries per day even on a normal day. An exceptional make-you-want-to-quit kind of day might see a few thousand. Any thoughts?
I would make the feed a static file (you can easily serve thousands of these), regenerated periodically. Then you have a much broader choice, because it doesn't have to run below second, it can run even minutes. And users still get perfect download speed and reasonable update speed.
If you are building a system with notifications that must not be missed, then a pub-sub mechanism (using XMPP, one of the other protocols supported by ApacheMQ, or something similar) will be more suitable that a syndication mechanism. You need some measure of coupling between the system that is generating the notifications and ones that are consuming them, to ensure that consumers don't miss notifications.
(You can do this using RSS or Atom as a transport format, but it's probably not a common use case; you'd need to vary the notifications shown based on the consumer and which notifications it has previously seen.)
I'd split up the feeds as much as possible and let users recombine them as desired. If I were doing it I'd probably think about using Django and the syndication framework.
Django's models could probably handle representing the data structure of the tables you care about.
You could have a URL that catches everything, like: r'/rss/(?(\w*?)/)+' (I think that might work, but I can't test it now so it might not be perfect).
That way you could use URLs like (edited to cancel the auto-linking of example URLs):
http:// feedserver/rss/batch-file-output/
http:// feedserver/rss/support-tickets/
http:// feedserver/rss/batch-file-output/support-tickets/ (both of the first two combined into one)
Then in the view:
def get_batch_file_messages():
# Grab all the recent batch files messages here.
# Maybe cache the result and only regenerate every so often.
# Other feed functions here.
feed_mapping = { 'batch-file-output': get_batch_file_messages, }
def rss(request, *args):
items_to_display = []
for feed in args:
items_to_display += feed_mapping[feed]()
# Processing/returning the feed.
Having individual, chainable feeds means that users can subscribe to one feed at a time, or merge the ones they care about into one larger feed. Whatever's easier for them to read, they can do.
Without knowing your application, I can't offer specific advice.
That said, it's common in these sorts of systems to have a level of severity. You could have a query string parameter that you tack on to the end of the URL that specifies the severity. If set to "DEBUG" you would see every event, no matter how trivial. If you set it to "FATAL" you'd only see the events that that were "System Failure" in magnitude.
If there are still too many events, you may want to sub-divide your events in to some sort of category system. Again, I would have this as a query string parameter.
You can then have multiple RSS feeds for the various categories and severities. This should allow you to tune the level of alerts you get an acceptable level.
In this case, it's more of a manager's dashboard: how much work was put into support today, is there anything pressing in the log right now, and for when we first arrive in the morning as a measure of what went wrong with batch jobs overnight.
Okay, I decided how I'm gonna handle this. I'm using the timestamp field for each column and grouping by day. It takes a little bit of SQL-fu to make it happen since of course there's a full timestamp there and I need to be semi-intelligent about how I pick the log message to show from within the group, but it's not too bad. Further, I'm building it to let you select which application to monitor, and then showing every message (max 50) from a specific day.
That gets me down to something reasonable.
I'm still hoping for a good answer to the more generic question: "How do you syndicate many important messages, where missing a message could be a problem?"