COAS — GCPR Issue: Using Relational Operators

The ability to specify qualifiers will be an important facet of the GCPR COAS Implementation. Thus the get_observations_by_qualifier call will be used to specify filters for the data being requested. Relational operators will be a key element of the inbound qualifiers on this call - for example to specify that the results include values greater than a specified value.
Though the COAS Specification shows that relational operators (greater-then, less-than, etc) can be specified for a value field, such as Numeric, in an optional component, the IDL does actually not contain any such optional field. Thus there is no current way to specify these relationships. Additionally, we suggest that the CodedElement class (subclass to ObservationValue) contain an optional field for relational operators. It is possible that a qualifier may include a coded element that needs such a relational operator.