AFEF SAMET ELLOUZE*, ZOUHAIER BRAHMIA**, RAFIK BOUAZIZ**

* Superior Institute of the Technological Studies of Sfax, Road of El-bustane, Sfax, Tunisia
** Faculty of Economic Sciences and Management, University of Sfax, Road of the Aerodrome, Sfax, Tunisia

Abstract
In this paper, we present an XML-based approach to define electronic medical records and to manage their evolution and their publishing on the web. Whereas many researches has recently focused on the problem of modeling medical records through XML, a few attention has been devoted to schema evolution and schema versioning in such XML documents. For this finality, we introduce a multi-version data model based on XML schema and define basic mechanisms for the management of multi-version medical records. Schema versioning of XML medical records creates new schema versions and preserves old ones and their corresponding data. This allows to: (i) keep and maintain the complete therapeutic history of the patient, (ii) have efficient preservation of critical medical information and (iii) be able to support historical queries on the evolution of medical records and their contents. This approach is based on the XML Schema language for describing XML schema medical records taking their multimedia characteristic in consideration.

Keywords: Electronic medical record, Temporal XML, Version management, Schema versioning, XML documents.