Ocean Informatics is announcing its specification for an Archetype Definition language (ADL). What is it good for? Short version: ‘future-proof information systems can be built’ with it which is handy in medicine. ‘…ADL provides all the syntax for describing constraints on any domain entity whose data is persisted in objects described by an information model (e.g. expressed in UML/OCL). It is primarily useful when generic information models are used for representing all data in a system, for example, where the logical concepts PATIENT, DOCTOR and HOSPITAL might all be represented using the class PARTY, ADDRESS, and related generic classes. Archetypes are then used to constrain the valid structures of instances of these generic classes to represent the desired domain concepts. In this way future-proof information systems can be built – relatively simple information models and database schemas can be defined, and archetypes supply the specific modelling, completely outside the software…