An ontology-based approach for data integration in regionally interoperable healthcare systems

In order to best utilize the limited resource of medical resources, and to reduce the cost and improve the quality of medical treatment, we propose to build an interoperable regional healthcare systems among several levels of medical treatment organizations. In this paper, our approaches are as follows:(1) the ontology based approach is introduced as the methodology and technological solution for information integration; (2) the integration framework of data sharing among different organizations are proposed(3)the virtual database to realize data integration of hospital information system is established. Our methods realize the effective management and integration of the medical workflow and the mass information in the interoperable regional healthcare system. Furthermore, this research provides the interoperable regional healthcare system with characteristic of modularization, expansibility and the stability of the system is enhanced by hierarchy structure

Applying Genre-Based Ontologies to Enterprise Architecture

This paper elaborates the approach of using ontologies as a conceptual base for enterprise architecture (EA) descriptions. The method focuses on recognising and modelling business critical information concepts, their content, and semantics used to operate the business. Communication genres and open and semi-structured information need interviews are used as a domain analysis method. Ontologies aim to explicate the results of domain analysis and to provide a common reference model for Business Information Architecture (BIA) descriptions. The results are generalised to model further aspects of EA

Ontology driven integration platform for clinical and translational research

Semantic Web technologies offer a promising framework for integration of disparate biomedical data. In this paper we present the semantic information integration platform under development at the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences (CCTS) at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHSC-H) as part of our Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program. We utilize the Semantic Web technologies not only for integrating, repurposing and classification of multi-source clinical data, but also to construct a distributed environment for information sharing, and collaboration online. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is used to modularize and distribute reusable services in a dynamic and distributed environment. Components of the semantic solution and its overall architecture are described

Data Workflow - A Workflow Model for Continuous Data Processing

Online data or streaming data are getting more and more important for enterprise information systems, e.g. by integrating sensor data and workflows. The continuous flow of data provided e.g. by sensors requires new workflow models addressing the data perspective of these applications, since continuous data is potentially infinite while business process instances are always finite.\ud In this paper a formal workflow model is proposed with data driven coordination and explicating properties of the continuous data processing. These properties can be used to optimize data workflows, i.e., reducing the computational power for processing the workflows in an engine by reusing intermediate processing results in several workflows

A contextual semantic mediator for a distributed cooperative maintenance platform.

International audiencePlatforms expand maintenance systems from centralized systems into e-maintenance platforms integrating various cooperative distributed systems and maintenance applications. This phenomenon allowed an evolution in services offered to maintenance actors by integrating more intelligent applications, providing decision support and facilitating the access to needed data. To manage this evolution, e-maintenance platforms must respond to a great challenge which is ensuring an interoperable communication between its integrated systems. By combining different techniques used in previous works, we propose in this work a semantic mediator system ensuring a high level of interoperability between systems in the maintenance platform

An Approach for Service Oriented Discovery and Retrieval of Spatial Data

ABSTRACT Successful information integration and sharing data across disparate systems and designs are required for fast access to and interpretation of many types of geospatial information. Spatial data are highly heterogeneous -not only they differ from data representation and storage methods, but they also differ in the way of querying the data. Finding and accessing spatial data in an environment like this is a crucial task. Enterprise geographic information system (E-GIS) is an organization-wide approach to GIS implementation, operation, and management. The main focus of the paper is to integrate diverse spatial data repositories for geographic applications using service-based methodology. We have adopted service-oriented architecture (SOA) for the discovery and retrieval of geospatial data. The architecture uses a central ontology as metadata information, which acts as service broker. Ontology-based discovery and retrieval of geographic data solves the problem of semantic heterogeneity, the major bottleneck for spatial interoperability. The implementation is in compliant with the Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS), the web service standards proposed by OGC. The need for loosely coupled service-based access of data in the spatial domain has been exploited. A query processing mechanism in distributed environment of spatial data sources has been discussed at the end. The proposed system has been implemented and fully tested

ASSEMBLY DIFFERENTIATION IN CAD SYSTEMS

This work presents a data model for differentiating and sharing assembly design (AsD) information during collaborative design. Joints between parts are an important aspect of assembly models that are often ambiguous when sharing of models takes place. Although various joints may have similar geometries and topologies, their joining methods and process parameters may vary significantly. It is possible to attach notes and annotations to geometric entities within CAD environments in order to distinguish joints; however, such textual information does not readily prepare models for sharing among collaborators or downstream processes such as simulation and analysis. At present, textual information must be examined and interpreted by the human designer and cannot be interpreted or utilized by the computer; thus, making the querying of information potentially cumbersome and time consuming.This work presents an AsD ontology that explicitly represents assembly constraints, including joining constraints, and infers any remaining implicit ones. By relating concepts through ontology technology rather than just defining an arbitrary data structure, assembly and joining concepts can be captured in their entirety or extended as necessary. By using the knowledge captured by the ontology, similar-looking joints can be differentiated and the collaboration and downstream product development processes further automated, as the semantics attached to the assembly model prepares it for use within the Semantic Web

ISURF: RFID Enabled Collaborative Supply Chain Planning Environment

To be able to cope with the requirements of today’s competitive and demanding digital world of business, companies, especially SMEs, need to be more agile, and be ready to react to the changing requirements of the sector. This requires a better view and a more comprehensive analysis of the whole marketplace which can be achieved through a knowledge oriented collaborative supply chain planning initiative. The parties also need to be capable of monitoring the supply chain visibility in a real time fashion, which can be enabled through the use of RFID devices. RFID enabled collaborative supply chain planning has been achieved by big industry players in well defined restricted business circumstances through some selected standard message schemes. However, SMEs are still far behind in this process due to their small IT budgets. In iSURF Project we address this problem by providing a set of open source tools to enable seamless collection of supply chain visibility, synchronizing this with master data, exchanging supply chain visibility and other planning data with each other through a service oriented supply chain planning environment which also handles the interoperability of the messages exchanged

Transforming Existing Procedural Business Processes into a Constraint-Based Formalism

Many organizations use business process management to manage and model their processes. Currently, flow-based process formalisms, such as BPMN, are considered the standard for modeling processes. However, recent literature describes several limitations of this type of formalism that can be solved by adopting a constraint-based formalism. To preserve economic investments in existing process models, transformation activities needed to be limited. This paper presents a methodical approach for performing the tedious parts of process model transformation. Executing the method results in correctly transformed process models and reduces the effort required for converting the process models

Mediation of foundation ontology based knowledge sources

Ontologies are helpful in giving interoperable structures to sources of knowledge and information. This interoperability, however, is greatly hindered by the heterogeneity of independently developed ontologies which in turn increases the requirements for mediation systems to reconcile the differences. A core concepts ontology for a certain domain contained by a foundation ontology can be used to alleviate this problem and to facilitate the reconciliation efforts. Possible differences in the use of concepts from the core concepts to model entities in domain ontologies can be prevented by binding the domain ontology developers to some rules. These rules can be particularly useful for domain ontologies requiring some kind of traceability of their concepts in the foundation ontology. The mediation system can then use this traceability to establish similarities between two ontologies. Software applications, like the one explained in this paper, can then be developed to perform the mediation task automatically and accurately