The organization of this specification follows the outline of the perspectives discussed in the Approach section—conceptual, logical, and physical. Below is a listing of the chapters with a short summary of the content of each.
Chapter 1 – Introduction provides introductory and background material for the specification.
Chapter 2 – Author’s Guide provides a high-level discussion of the Clinical Quality Language syntax. This discussion is a self-contained introduction to the language targeted at clinical quality authors.
Chapter 3 – Developer’s Guide provides a more in-depth look at the Clinical Quality Language targeted at developers familiar with typical development languages such as Java, C#, and SQL.
Chapter 4 – Logical Specification provides a complete description of the elements that can be used to represent quality logic. Note that Chapters 2 and 3 describe the same functional capabilities of the language, and that anything that can be expressed in one mechanism can be equivalently expressed in the other.
Chapter 5 – Language Semantics describes the intended semantics of the language, covering topics such as data layer integration and expected run-time behavior.
Chapter 6 – Translation Semantics describes the mapping between CQL and ELM, as well as outlines for how to perform translation from CQL to ELM, and vice versa.
Chapter 7 – Physical Representation is reference documentation for the XML schema used to persist ELM.
Appendix B – CQL Reference provides a complete reference for the types and operators available in CQL, and is intended to be used by authors and developers alike.
Appendix C – Reference Implementations provides information about where to find reference implementations for a CQL-ELM translator, a CQL Execution Framework for JavaScript, and other related tooling.