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

Model-driven design, simulation and implementation of service compositions in COSMO

The success of software development projects to a large extent depends on the quality of the models that are produced in the development process, which in turn depends on the conceptual and practical support that is available for modelling, design and analysis. This paper focuses on model-driven support for service-oriented software development. In particular, it addresses how services and compositions of services can be designed, simulated and implemented. The support presented is part of a larger framework, called COSMO (COnceptual Service MOdelling). Whereas in previous work we reported on the conceptual support provided by COSMO, in this paper we proceed with a discussion of the practical support that has been developed. We show how reference models (model types) and guidelines (design steps) can be iteratively applied to design service compositions at a platform independent level and discuss what tool support is available for the design and analysis during this phase. Next, we present some techniques to transform a platform independent service composition model to an implementation in terms of BPEL and WSDL. We use the mediation scenario of the SWS challenge (concerning the establishment of a purchase order between two companies) to illustrate our application of the COSMO framework

Semantic Web Services Provisioning

Semantic Web Services constitute an important research area, where vari ous underlying frameworks, such as WSMO and OWL-S, define Semantic Web ontologies to describe Web services, so they can be automatically discovered, composed, and invoked. Service discovery has been traditionally interpreted as a functional filter in current Semantic Web Services frameworks, frequently performed by Description Logics reasoners. However, semantic provisioning has to be performed taking Quality-of-Service (QOS) into account, defining user preferences that enable QOS-aware Semantic Web Service selection. Nowadays, the research focus is actually on QOS-aware processes, so cur rent proposals are developing the field by providing QOS support to semantic provisioning, especially in selection processes. These processes lead to opti mization problems, where the best service among a set of services has to be selected, so Description Logics cannot be used in this context. Furthermore, user preferences has to be semantically defined so they can be used within selection processes. There are several proposals that extend Semantic Web Services frameworks allowing QOS-aware semantic provisioning. However, proposed selection techniques are very coupled with their proposed extensions, most of them being implemented ad hoc. Thus, there is a semantic gap between functional descriptions (usually using WSMO or OWL-S) and user preferences, which are specific for each proposal, using different ontologies or even non-semantic de scriptions, and depending on its corresponding ad hoc selection technique. In this report, we give an overview of most important Semantic Web Ser vices frameworks, showing a comparison between them. Then, a thorough analysis of state-of-the art proposals on QOS-aware semantic provisioning and user preferences descriptions is presented, discussing about their applicabil ity, advantages, and defects. Results from this analysis motivate our research work, which has been already materialized in two early contributions.Los servicios web semánticos constituyen un importante campo de inves tigación, en el cual distintos frameworks, como por ejemplo WSMO y OWL-S, definen ontologías de la web semántica para describir servicios web, de for ma que estos puedan ser descubiertos, compuestos e invocados de manera automática. El descubrimiento de servicios ha sido interpretado tradicional mente como un filtro funcional en los frameworks actuales de servicios web semánticos, usando para ello razonadores de lógica descriptiva. Sin embargo, las tareas de aprovisionamiento semántico deberían tener en cuenta la calidad del servicio, definiendo para ello preferencias de usuario de manera que sea posible realizar una selección de servicios web semánticos sensible a la cali dad. Actualmente, el foco de la investigación está en procesos sensibles a la ca lidad, por lo que las propuestas actuales están trabajando en este campo intro duciendo el soporte adecuado a la calidad del servicio dentro del aprovisio namiento semántico, y principalmente en las tareas de selección. Estas tareas desembocan en problemas de optimización, donde el mejor servicio de entre un concjunto debe ser seleccionado, por lo que las lógicas descriptivas no pue den ser usadas en este contexto. Además, las preferencias de usuario deben ser definidas semánticamente, de forma que puedan ser usadas en las tareas de selección. Existen bastantes propuestas que extienden los frameworks de servicios web semánticos para habilitar el aprovisionamiento sensible a la calidad. Sin embargo, las técnicas de selección propuestas están altamente acopladas con dichas extensiones, donde la mayoría de ellas implementan algoritmos ad hoc. Por tanto, existe un salto semántico entre las descripciones funcionales (nor malmente usando WSMO o OWL-S) y las preferencias de usuario, las cuales son definidas específicamente por cada propuesta, usando ontologías distin tas o incluso descripciones no semánticas que dependen de la correspondiente técnica de selección ad hoc

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

iSemServ : a framework for engineering intelligent semantic services

The need for modern enterprises and Web users to simply and rapidly develop and deliver platform-independent services to be accessed over the Web by the global community is growing. This is self-evident, when one considers the omnipresence of electronic services (e-services) on the Web. Accordingly, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is commonly considered as one of the de facto standards for the provisioning of heterogeneous business functionalities on the Web. As the basis for SOA, Web Services (WS) are commonly preferred, particularly because of their ability to facilitate the integration of heterogeneous systems. However, WS only focus on syntactic descriptions when describing the functional and behavioural aspects of services. This makes it a challenge for services to be automatically discovered, selected, composed, invoked, and executed – without any human intervention. Consequently, Semantic Web Services (SWS) are emerging to deal with such a challenge. SWS represent the convergence of Semantic Web (SW) and WS concepts, in order to enable Web services that can be automatically processed and understood by machines operating with limited or no user intervention. At present, research efforts within the SWS domain are mainly concentrated on semantic services automation aspects, such as discovery, matching, selection, composition, invocation, and execution. Moreover, extensive research has been conducted on the conceptual models and formal languages used in constructing semantic services. However, in terms of the engineering of semantic services, a number of challenges are still prevalent, as demonstrated by the lack of development and use of semantic services in real-world settings. The lack of development and use could be attributed to a number of challenges, such as complex semantic services enabling technologies, leading to a steep learning curve for service developers; lack of unified service platforms for guiding and supporting simple and rapid engineering of semantic services, and the limited integration of semantic technologies with mature service-oriented technologies. vi In addition, a combination of isolated software tools is normally used to engineer semantic services. This could, however, lead to undesirable consequences, such as prolonged service development times, high service development costs, lack of services re-use, and the lack of semantics interoperability, reliability, and re-usability. Furthermore, available software platforms do not support the creation of semantic services that are intelligent beyond the application of semantic descriptions, as envisaged for the next generation of services, where the connection of knowledge is of core importance. In addressing some of the challenges highlighted, this research study adopted a qualitative research approach with the main focus on conceptual modelling. The main contribution of this study is thus a framework called iSemServ to simplify and accelerate the process of engineering intelligent semantic services. The framework has been modelled and developed, based on the principles of simplicity, rapidity, and intelligence. The key contributions of the proposed framework are: (1) An end-to-end and unified approach of engineering intelligent semantic services, thereby enabling service engineers to use one platform to realize all the modules comprising such services; (2) proposal of a model-driven approach that enables the average and expert service engineers to focus on developing intelligent semantic services in a structured, extensible, and platform-independent manner. Thereby increasing developers’ productivity and minimizing development and maintenance costs; (3) complexity hiding through the exploitation of template and rule-based automatic code generators, supporting different service architectural styles and semantic models; and (4) intelligence wrapping of services at message and knowledge levels, for the purposes of automatically processing semantic service requests, responses and reasoning over domain ontologies and semantic descriptions by keeping user intervention at a minimum. The framework was designed by following a model-driven approach and implemented using the Eclipse platform. It was evaluated using practical use case scenarios, comparative analysis, and performance and scalability experiments. In conclusion, the iSemServ framework is considered appropriate for dealing with the complexities and restrictions involved in engineering intelligent semantic services, especially because the amount of time required to generate intelligent semantic vii services using the proposed framework is smaller compared with the time that the service engineer would need to manually generate all the different artefacts comprising an intelligent semantic service. Keywords: Intelligent semantic services, Web services, Ontologies, Intelligent agents, Service engineering, Model-driven techniques, iSemServ framework.ComputingD. Phil. (Computer science

Methods for Efficient and Accurate Discovery of Services

With an increasing number of services developed and offered in an enterprise setting or the Web, users can hardly verify their requirements manually in order to find appropriate services. In this thesis, we develop a method to discover semantically described services. We exploit comprehensive service and request descriptions such that a wide variety of use cases can be supported. In our discovery method, we compute the matchmaking decision by employing an efficient model checking technique

Semantic concepts in product usage monitoring and analysis

Nowadays, complex electronic products, such as DVD players or mobile phones, offer a huge number of functions. As a consequence of the complexity of the devices, customers often have problems to use such products effectively. For example, it has been observed that an increasing number of technically sound products is returned due to, e.g., interaction problems. One possible root cause of this problem is that most product development processes are still too technologydriven, i.e., potential users are brought into contact with the product only at a very late stage. If early consumer tests are carried out, then these typically aim at abstract market evaluations rather than formulating concrete requirements towards the functionality of the product. As a result, products often have little meaning or relevance to the customers. Therefore, we need better ways to involve users in the development of such products. This can be achieved by observing product usage in the field and incorporating the gained knowledge in the product creation process. This paper proposes an approach to build automatic observation modules into products, collect usage data, and analyze these data by means of process mining techniques exploiting a novel semantic link between observation and analysis. This link yields two main benefits: (i) it adds focus to the potential mass of captured data items; and (ii) it reduces the need for extensive post-processing of the collected data. Together, these two benefits speed up the information feedback cycle towards development