Sex and Core Components

["William J. Kammerer" <wkammerer@foresightcorp.com>]

Back in December I recommended that the party gender be coded with ISO
5218:1977 Information Interchange-Representation of Human Sexes.  See
http://lists.ebxml.org/archives/ebxml-core/200012/msg00014.html.  Now I
see from Mike Conroy's UML diagram that party gender.code details is now
derived from code.details.  How many classifications of sex are there?
Come on: the standards folks went to the trouble to flit around to
various exotic pleasure spots throughout the world to bring forth ISO
5218, and the least we should do is use it as the basis of the gender
core component.  Even UN/EDIFACT recognizes that there're only so many
ways to describe gender, and notes that Data Element 3499 (Gender code)
should use ISO 5218; see
http://www.unece.org/trade/untdid/d96b/tred/tred3499.htm.

Except for the EDIFACT note and our own Martin Bryan, I would never have
known that such an extensive code list existed.  Martin is somewhat
responsible for the information describing ISO 5218 at
http://www.diffuse.org/medical.html#Sex.

I'm going to have to make sure that ISO 5218 - the sex code - is
included in the compendium of standards used in "IT-enablement" being
addressed by the new international standard ISO/IEC 18022.

By the way, the Initial Core Components Catalogue at Line 87 for
location identification.details within location.details is specified
with "R" in the "Required (R)" column, but has a MinMaxConstraints of
0..1.  Is this what Paula Heilig was referring to when she said there's
a difference between the requirements and the constraints?   Or is it
just a typo? If the latter, it's just one more reason to get rid of the
"Required (R)" column.

William J. Kammerer
FORESIGHT Corp.
4950 Blazer Pkwy.
Dublin, OH USA 43017-3305
+1 614 791-1600

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