Combining dictionary techniques with extensible markup language (XML)--requirements to a new approach towards flexible and standardized documentation.

In oncology various international and national standards exist for the documentation of different aspects of a disease. Since elements of these standards are repeated in different contexts, a common data dictionary could support consistent representation in any context. For the construction of such a dictionary existing documents have to be worked up in a complex procedure, that considers aspects of hierarchical decomposition of documents and of domain control as well as aspects of user presentation and models of the underlying model of patient data. In contrast to other thesauri, text chunks like definitions or explanations are very important and have to be preserved, since oncologic documentation often means coding and classification on an aggregate level and the safe use of coding systems is an important precondition for comparability of data. This paper discusses the potentials of the use of XML in combination with a dictionary for the promotion and development of standard conformable applications for tumor documentation.