Hello all,
Here is a proposal to add a field for Country to the Location table in CDM.
Thanks, Ajit
Details
The CDM’s Location table includes physical location fields such as street address, state, zip code, and county. However, there is no field for capturing the country.
Use cases, analytical questions
For data sets with data originating from multiple countries, there is no way to represent this difference in country; you could not stratify an analysis on country or include country as a covariate.
Exploration of the state of the field, other implementations-
The only way to represent data from multiple countries and make that distinction clear now is to have multiple CDM databases or force-feed the country information into a field, causing the CDM to be non-standard.
Importance, also with respect to other projects
Not critical, and actually no use case exists within our team currently, but it could be useful in the future.
Consequences of doing it and not doing it including technical (e.g. implications on vocab, existing software), resources
Limited impact, as it would not be reliant upon the Vocabulary. Standardized representations of country names, such as the ISO Alpha-3 code, could be used in order to constrain the field to 3 characters and prevent the field from becoming unwieldy. Country would be an optional field, so no existing CDMs would be affected.