PPEPR: plug and play electronic patient records.

ABSTRACT The integration of Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems is at the centre of many of the new regional and national initiatives to integrate clinical processes across department, region, and national levels. Web Service technologies offer significant solutions to provide an interoperable communication infrastructure but are unable to support precise definitions for healthcare messages, functionality, and standards, required for making meaningful integration. The lack of interoperability within healthcare standards adds complexity to the initiatives. This heterogeneity exists within two versions of same standard (e.g. HL7), and also between standards (e.g. HL7, openEHR, CEN TC/251 13606). We therefore introduce an integration platform PPEPR (Plug and Play Electronic Patient Records), which is based on the principles of a semantic Service-Oriented Architecture (sSOA). PPEPR solves the problem of interoperability at the semantic level. A key focus of PPEPR is that once a patient information is captured, should be available for use across all potential care processes

PPEPR for Enterprise Healthcare Integration

Abstract. PPEPR is software to connect healthcare enterprises. Healthcare is a complex domain and any integration system that connects healthcare enterprise applications must facilitate heterogeneous healthcare systems at all levels -data, services, processes, healthcare vendors, standards, legacy systems, and new information systems, all of which must interoperate to provide healthcare services. The lack of interoperability within healthcare standards (e.g. HL7) adds complexity to the interoperability initiatives. HL7's user base has been growing since the early 2000s. There are many interoperability issues between the widely adopted HL7 v2 and its successor, HL7 v3, in terms of consistency, data/message modeling, precision, and useability. We have proposed an integration platform called PPEPR: (Plug and Play Electronic Patient Records) which is based on a semantic Service-oriented Architecture (sSOA). PPEPR connects HL7 (v2 & v3) compliant healthcare enterprises. Our main goal is to provide seamless integration between healthcare enterprises without imposing any constraint on existing or proposed EPRs

Leveraging Semantic Web Service Descriptions for Validation by Automated Functional Testing

Recent years have seen the utilisation of Semantic Web Service descriptions for automating a wide range of service-related activities, with a primary focus on service discovery, composition, execution and mediation. An important area which so far has received less attention is service validation, whereby advertised services are proven to conform to required behavioural specifications. This paper proposes a method for validation of service-oriented systems through automated functional testing. The method leverages ontology-based and rule-based descriptions of service inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects (IOPE) for constructing a stateful EFSM specification. The specification is subsequently utilised for functional testing and validation using the proven Stream X-machine (SXM) testing methodology. Complete functional test sets are generated automatically at an abstract level and are then applied to concrete Web services, using test drivers created from the Web service descriptions. The testing method comes with completeness guarantees and provides a strong method for validating the behaviour of Web services

E-business framework enabled B2B integration

Standards for B2B integration help to facilitate the interoperability between organisations. These standards, often called e-business frameworks, guide integration by specifying the details for business processes, business documents and secure messaging. Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) is used in modern e-business frameworks instead of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) formats. Having XML as the data format is not enough for integration, but e-business frameworks are needed to guide how XML is used. This work analyses the many partly competing and overlapping e-business frameworks how they differ in support for business processes, documents and secure messaging. In addition, the effect of standardisation organisation to the outcome of the e-business framework is studied. In this work, one e-business framework, RosettaNet, is used to tackle the challenges of product development (PD) integrations. A proof-of-concept implementation of a RosettaNet integration is provided to support PD and the lessons learned are discussed. The current specifications lack good processes for PD integrations, while they fail in specifying the concepts needed for document management. Furthermore, there are interoperability problems due to a lack of expressivity of the schema languages to encode the business documents, and the current setup of integration takes a very long time. RosettaNet has a lot of flexibility in the specifications, and thus just supporting the same standard process is not enough for interoperability. With semantic technologies, many shortcomings of the current standards for B2B integration can be solved, as they make it possible to present constraints the current technologies have problems with. This work presents a practical case of B2B integration with semantic technologies and describes the benefits of applying such technologies.Standardit tukevat organisaatioiden välistä järjestelmäintegraatiota. Integroinnin standardit määrittelevät organisaatioiden välisiä liiketoimintaprosesseja, -dokumentteja sekä määrittelevät turvallisen tavan kommunikoida. Nykyaikaiset standardit ovat XML-perusteisia vanhemman EDI-formaatin sijaan. XML:n käyttö ei ole riittävästi takaamaan integraation onnistumista, vaan tarvitaan tarkempaa sopimista, miten XML:ää käytetään integraatiossa. Joukko yritystenvälisen integroinnin standardeja määrittelee tämän. Tässä työssä analysoidaan useaa, osittain kilpailevaa, yritystenvälisen integroinnin standardia ja tutkitaan miten ne tukevat liiketoimintaprosessien, -dokumenttien ja turvallisen viestinvälityksen määrittelyjä ottaen huomioon myös standardointiorganisaation vaikutuksen lopputulokseen. Tässä työssä RosettaNet-standardia sovelletaan tuotekehitykseen liittyvissä integroinneissa. Työssä esitetään prototyyppi tuotekehitystiedon integroinnista RosettaNetin avulla ja keskustellaan saavutetuista kokemuksista. Nykyiset spesifikaatiot tuotekehitysprosesseille ovat tarpeisiin riittämättömiä, koska tuki dokumenttien hallinnan käsitteistölle on puutteellinen. Myös RosettaNetin käyttämien XML-skeemakielien puutteellinen ilmaisuvoima aiheuttaa ongelmia dokumenttien yhteentoimivuudelle. Lisäksi integraation tekeminen on hidasta verrattuna tyypillisen tuotekehitysprojektin kestoon. RosettaNetin tarjoamissa spesifikaatioissa on paljon joustavuutta, joten saman standardiprosessin tukeminen ei tarkoita, että järjestelmät ovat yhteentoimivia. Nykyspesifikaatioissa ja niissä käytettyjen skeema-kielten ilmaisuvoiman puutteet voidaan osittain paikata käyttämällä semanttisia teknologioita. Tämä työ esittää, miten integraatioissa voidaan saavuttaa semanttisia teknologioita käyttämällä parempi yhteentoimivuus.reviewe

Integrating semantic business process management and viewbased modeling

Mit dem zunehmenden Interesse an Service Orientierten Architekturen und den damit verbundenen Technologien, wie zum Beispiel Web Services und der Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), hat Geschäftsprozessmanagement in den letzten Jahren an Bedeutung gewonnen. Dennoch besteht eine Kluft zwischen der Gestaltung von Geschäftsprozessen, wie sie von ExpertInnen der Geschäftswelt durchgeführt wird, und deren Ausführung, die von IT-ExpertInnen umgesetzt und gewartet wird. Derzeit gibt es intensive Forschungsansätze im Bereich semantischer Technologien, die hohe Automatisierbarkeit versprechen, sodass diese Kluft weitgehend oder sogar vollständig überwunden werden soll. Erreicht werden soll dies durch eine wohldefinierte Wissensrepräsentation, die logisches Schließen erlaubt, auf der einen Seite sowie Generation von ausführbarem Code auf der anderen Seite. In dieser Magisterarbeit analyisieren wir die Möglichkeiten, ontologisiertes Wissen in ausführbaren Code zu übersetzen und präsentieren einen allgemeinen Entwicklungsprozess, der die Möglichkeiten von Modellgetriebener Softwareentwicklung (Model Driven Software Development, MDSD) nützt, um dieses Ziel zu erreichen. Dieser allgemeine Prozess wird dann an Hand einer konkreten Implementierung im Rahmen des SemBiz Projekts evaluiert. Im Rahmen des Projektes gibt es eine Semantische Schicht, basierend auf der Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO), die Abfrage und Schließen über die Prozesse der Wissensbasis ermöglicht, und eine Modellgetriebene Schicht basierend auf dem Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), die für Prozessabstraktion und Codegenerierung verwendet wird.With the increasing interest in Service Oriented Architectures and related technologies, such as Web Services and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Business Process Management (BPM) has become more and more important in recent years. However, there still exists a gap between Business Process Modeling, as it is done by business experts, and Business Process Deployment and Execution, as it is maintained by IT Experts. Currently, a lot of research is going on in the field of semantic technologies, which promise to enable a high level of automation to narrow or even close this gap. This should be achieved through a well-defined knowledge representation which allows reasoning on the one hand and generation of executable code on the other hand. In this thesis, we analyze the options to transfer ontologized knowledge representations into executable code and suggest a generic engineering process model using the facilities of Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) to fulfill this goal. This generic process is evaluated by introducing a concrete implementation done for the SemBiz project, where a semantic layer based on the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) is used for querying and reasoning over the process space, and a MDSD layer based on Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) is used for process abstraction and code generation

An extensible semantic catalogue for geospatial web services

Searching for web services is a challenging task due to the diversity of existing discovery tools. Varying standards for service descriptions require different tools to query their content. These standards exist for good reasons. Web services are used in different application environments and special solutions are required for their integration. We suggest an architecture for web service catalogues, which takes this diversity of standards into account. Its extensibility allows for a complete separation between service discovery and service description. Using ontologies for the storage of service descriptions enables the support of different description standards without loosing their specific advantages. The discussion and implementation focuses on geospatial web services. Due to the heterogeneity of spatially referenced data, different specifications exist for them, making the problem of different standards for service discovery and service description most evident here