This site
This site and the namespaces are managed by the Australian Digital Health Agency (The Agency), an organisation established by the Australia, State and Territory governments to develop better ways of electronically collecting and securely exchanging health information. The Agency is developing specifications for electronic health in Australia, and is a participant in the Standards Australia IT-014 Committee.
Namespaces
Namespaces are used as unique values as XML namespaces, WSDL namespaces or simply as unique values formatted as a URI.
Namespaces are allocated so that they can be relied upon to be globally unique. The HTTP Uniform Resource Locator (URL) form of namespaces is being described here, even though other types of namespaces are possible. Loosely speaking, a URL consists of a scheme, host, and path. The scheme in this case is "http". The host is "ns.electronichealth.net.au". The path is allocated so that they are unique within this domain, therefore the namespace is also globally unique since no other party should be allocating namespaces with this domain.
A namespace is primarily an identifier. Even though these namespaces are URLs, they do not need to point to anything. Namespaces should not be used as Web hyperlinks. As a convenience, this site contains Web pages that document the namespaces, but the function of the namespace does not depend on that.
For further information about namespaces, please see:
- W3C, Namespaces in XML 1.0, W3C Recommendation.
- W3C, Associating Resources with Namespaces, TAG Finding.
Last Updated: 05 July 2024
Version: v2.21.0