Asuman Dogac

A survey and analysis of Electronic Healthcare Record standards

Medical information systems today store clinical information about patients in all kinds of proprietary formats. To address the resulting interoperability problems, several Electronic Healthcare Record standards that structure the clinical content for the purpose of exchange are currently under development. In this article, we present a survey of the most relevant Electronic Healthcare Record standards, examine the level of interoperability they provide, and assess their functionality in terms of content structure, access services, multimedia support, and security. We further investigate the complementarity of the standards and assess their market relevance.

A broader approach to personalization

Personalization generally refers to making a Web site more responsive to the unique and individual needs of each user. We propose a broader approach to personalization that provides for interoperability and automation by using the recent data exchange, meta data and privacy standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), namely, Extensible Markup Language (XML) [12], Resource Description Framework (RDF) [9, 10] and Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) [8]. First we briefly discuss these standards. Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML has gained a great momentum and is emerging as the standard for data exchange on the Internet. XML data is self describing through content oriented tags and this enables a computer to understand the meaning of data and hence enhances the ability of remote applications to interpret and operate on documents fetched over the Internet. One of XMLs strengths is its extensibility. Anyone can invent new tags for particular subject areas and they define what they mean in document type definitions (DTDs). But if every business uses its own XML definition for describing its data, it is not possible to achieve interoperability. In other words, a tagged document is not very useful without some agreement among inter-operating applications so as to what the tags mean and it is common DTDs which provide for this. A DTD specifies the structure of an XML document by specifying the names of its elements, sub-elements and attributes. XML-Query Language (XML-QL). The need to query XML documents to extract data is well addressed in the literature and one of the available languages is XML-QL [4]. XML-QL has a WHERE-CONSTRUCT clause, like the SELECT-WHERE of SQL, that can express queries, which extract pieces of data from XML documents, as well as transformations, which, for example, can map XML data between DTDs and can integrate XML data from different sources. Although XML-QL shares some functionalities with XMLs style sheet mechanism, it supports more data-intensive operations, such as joins and aggregates, and has better support for constructing new XML data, which is required by transformations. There is a need to use recursive functions in certain queries and XML-QL has been extended in this respect in [3]. Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF is a foundation for processing metadata for providing interoperability between applications that exchange machine understandable information and currently is a recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). RDF imposes a syntax and structural constraints in describing …

Artemis: deploying semantically enriched web services in the healthcare domain

An essential element in defining the semantics of Web services is the domain knowledge. Medical informatics is one of the few domains to have considerable domain knowledge exposed through standards. These standards offer significant value in terms of expressing the semantics of Web services in the healthcare domain. In this paper, we describe the architecture of the Artemis project, which exploits ontologies based on the domain knowledge exposed by the healthcare information standards through standard bodies like HL7, CEN TC251, ISO TC215 and GEHR. We use these standards for two purposes: first to describe the Web service functionality semantics, that is, the meaning associated with what a Web service does and secondly to describe the meaning associated with the messages or documents exchanged through Web services. Artemis Web service architecture uses ontologies to describe semantics but it does not propose globally agreed ontologies; rather healthcare institutes reconcile their semantic differences through a mediator component. The mediator component uses ontologies based on prominent healthcare standards as references to facilitate semantic mediation among involved institutes. Mediators have a P2P communication architecture to provide scalability and to facilitate the discovery of other mediators.

Artemis message exchange framework: semantic interoperability of exchanged messages in the healthcare domain

One of the most challenging problems in the healthcare domain is providing interoperability among healthcare information systems. In order to address this problem, we propose the semantic mediation of exchanged messages. Given that most of the messages exchanged in the healthcare domain are in EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) or XML format, we describe how to transform these messages into OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontology instances. The OWL message instances are then mediated through an ontology mapping tool that we developed, namely, OWLmt. OWLmt uses OWL-QL engine which enables the mapping tool to reason over the source ontology instances while generating the target ontology instances according to the mapping patterns defined through a GUI.Through a prototype implementation, we demonstrate how to mediate between HL7 Version 2 and HL7 Version 3 messages. However, the framework proposed is generic enough to mediate between any incompatible healthcare standards that are currently in use.

Workflow Management Systems and Interoperability

It has been over ten years since the first workflow product was introduced. Despite the large number of workflow vendors and various research efforts all over the world, as well as the hype about the workflow market, workflow technology is still far from pervasive. This paper assesses the situation from a technical point of view, focusing on the development and enactment aspects of workflow processes. We discuss the current capabilities of workflow products, major issues that need to be addressed before workflow can be pervasive, as well as possible future trends and research that will help workflow succeed.

Enriching ebXML registries with OWL ontologies for efficient service discovery

Web services, like their real life counterparts have several properties and thus truly useful semantic information can only be defined through standard ontology languages. Semantic Web is an important initiative in this respect. However, although service registries are the major mechanisms to discover services, the semantic support provided by service registries is completely detached from the semantic Web effort. In this paper, we address how ebXML registries can be enriched through OWL ontologies to describe Web service semantics. We describe how the various constructs of OWL can be mapped to ebXML classification hierarchies and show how the stored semantics can be queried through standardized queries by using the ebXML query facility. We also provide our observations on how ebXML registries can be extended to provide more efficient semantic support.

Semantically enriched web services for the travel industry

Today, the travel information services are dominantly provided by Global Distribution Systems (GDS). The Global Distribution Systems provide access to real time availability and price information for flights, hotels and car rental companies. However GDSs have legacy architectures with private networks, specialized hardware, limited speed and search capabilities. Furthermore, being legacy systems, it is very difficult to interoperate them with other systems and data sources. For these reasons, Web service technology is an ideal fit for travel information systems. However to be able to exploit Web services to their full potential, it is necessary to introduce semantics. Without describing the semantics of Web services we are looking for, it is difficult to find them in an automated way and if we cannot describe the service we have, the probability that people will find it in an automated way is low. Furthermore, to make the semantics machine processable and interoperable, we need to describe domain knowledge through standard ontology languages. In this paper, we describe how to deploy semantically enriched travel Web services and how to exploit semantics through Web service registries. We also address the need to use the semantics in discovering both Web services and Web service registries through peer-to-peer technology.

SAPHIRE: A Multi-Agent System for Remote Healthcare Monitoring through Computerized Clinical Guidelines

Due to increasing percentage of graying population and patients with chronic diseases, the world is facing serious problems for serving high quality healthcare services to citizens at a reasonable costs. In this paper, we are providing a Clininical Desicion Support system for remote monitoring of patients at their homes, and at the hospital to decrease the load of medical practitioners and also healthcare costs. As the expert knowledge required to build the clinical decision support system, Clinical Guidelines are exploited. Examining the reasons of failure for adoption of clinical guidelines by healthcare institutes, we have realized that necessary measures should be taken in order to establish a semantic interoperability environment to be able to communicate with various heterogenous clinical systems. In this paper these requirements are detailed and a semantic infrastructure to enable easy deployment and execution of clinical guidelines in heterogenous healthcare enviroments is presented. Due to the nature of the problem which necessitates having many autonomous entities dealing with heterogenous distributed resources, we have built the system as a Multi-Agent System. The architecture described in this paper is realized within the scope of IST-27074 SAPHIRE project.

A survey and comparison of business-to-business e-commerce frameworks

Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce is booming thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet, which dwarfs the coverage of EDI VANs. B2B e-commerce needs to seamlessly and dynamically handle the interactions among a vast variety of organizations without ad hoc and proprietary integrations. A number of B2B e-commerce frameworks have emerged as a result. In this paper we present a brief survey and a comparison of some of these frameworks.

Multidatabase Query Optimization

A multidatabase system (MDBS) allows the users to simultaneously access heterogeneous,and autonomous databases using an integrated schema and a single global query language. The query optimization problem in MDBSs is quite different from the query optimization problem in distributed homogeneous databases due to schema heterogeneity and autonomy of local database systems. In this work, we consider the optimization of query distribution in case of data replication and the optimization of intersite joins, that is, the join of the results returned by the local sitesin response to the global subqueries. The algorithms presented for the optimization of intersite joins try to maximize the parallelism in execution and take the federated nature of the problem into account. It has also been shown through a comparativeperformance study that the proposed intersite join optimization algorithms are efficient.The approach presented can easily be generalized to any operation required for intersite query processing.The query optimization scheme presentedin this paper is being implemented within the scopeof a multidatabase system which is based on OMG‘sobject management architecture.