Christoph P. Neumann

α− Flow: A Document-Based Approach to Inter-institutional Process Support in Healthcare

Inter-institutional collaboration requires clean task boundaries and the separation of responsibilities. In addition, healthcare processes are intrinsically fluid. Traditional activity-oriented workflow models or content-oriented workflow models do not provide adequate support for the paper-based working practice in healthcare. The α-flow approach adopts electronic documents as the primary means of information ex-change, fusing both paradigms into a combined workflow schema model, wherein workflow schemas are represented as documents which are shared coequally to content documents.

A mediated publish-subscribe system for inter-institutional process support in healthcare

Inadequate availability of patient information is a major cause for medical errors and affects costs in healthcare. Traditional information integration in healthcare does not solve the problem. For chronic diseases and multimorbidity, the significance of patient information availability is yet increasing. Applying a document-oriented paradigm to a mediated publish-subscribe infrastructure allows to foster inter-institutional information exchange in healthcare. The goal of the proposed architecture is to provide information exchange between strict autonomous healthcare institutions, bridging the gap between primary and secondary care, following traditional paper-based working practice. In a distributed healthcare scenario, the patient has to maintain sovereignty over any personal health information. Therefore, the proposed mediated publish-subscribe architecture essentially decouples the roles of information author and information publisher into distinct actors.

The Alpha-Flow Use-Case of Breast Cancer Treatment - Modeling Inter-institutional Healthcare Workflows by Active Documents

In healthcare, inter-institutional process support implicates decentralized and ad-hoc workflows. From the perspective of system integration, the autonomy of the sites which are participating in a healthcare network is mostly untouchable. Traditional activity-oriented workflow models or content-oriented workflow models do not provide adequate support in such system environments and workflow scenarios. The objective of the alpha-Flow approach is to enable distributed, ad-hoc process support with initially unknown sets of actors and institutions. In its document-oriented workflow model, electronic documents become active documents and act as software agents as the primary means of coordination. This paper details the healthcare use-case for the alpha-Flow model by the example of cooperative breast-cancer treatment scenarios.

TESTEJB - A Measurement Framework for EJBs

Specification of Quality of Service (QoS) for components can only be done in relation to the QoS the components themselves are given by imported components. Developers as well as users need support in order to derive valid data for specification respectively for checking whether a selected component complies with its specification. In this paper we introduce the architecture of a measurement framework for EJBs giving such support and discuss in detail the measurement of the well understood property of response time.

The Alpha-Flow Approach to Inter-Institutional Process Support in Healthcare

Inter-institutional collaboration among physicians becomes increasingly important and yet, it’s unrealistic to assume that cooperation can be supported via a homogeneous system which is pre-installed in every organization. Instead physicians will typically have their own autonomous systems that support internal processes. Traditional activity-oriented workflow models or content-oriented process models do not resolve inter-institutional integration challenges. The authors present the a-Flow approach for distributed process management, which enables ad hoc collaboration via active electronic documents without the need to integrate local systems. A distributed case file, the a-Doc, is used to coordinate cooperating parties. Using this case file does not require any preinstalled system components, so true ad-hoc information interchange is enabled. The case file contains both, the inter-organizational process schema as a document, as well as arbitrary content documents that are shared among the cooperating parties. To illustrate the approach an inter-institutional use case is provided by cooperative breast-cancer treatment. The authors explain the rationale behind separating content, decision support, and coordination work and in large-scale inter-institutional scenarios its necessary to decouple collaboration functionality from the existing applications and to resolve the duality between content-oriented and activity-oriented process models.

Semantics of a runtime adaptable transaction manager

Database Management Systems (DBMSs) that can be tailored to specific requirements offer the potential to improve reliability and maintainability and simultaneously the ability to reduce the footprint of the code base. If the requirements of an application change during runtime the DBMS should be adapted without a shutdown. Runtime-adaptation is a new and promising research direction to dynamically change the behavior of a DBMS. Especially the adaptation of the Transaction Manager (TM) states a challenge. In this paper, we present the session semantics of a runtime-adaptable TM. We define preliminaries and assumptions to activate the TM during sessions from a conceptual point of view. The advantages and disadvanteges of different approaches are discussed, especially regarding the occurence of ANSI SQL phenomena. From a technical point of view, we define requirements for the architecture of the TM and the DBMS that arose in our prototype.

Exploitation of event-semantics for distributed publish/subscribe systems in massively multiuser virtual environments

Triggered by the fast evolving technical capabilities for implementing distributed global scale applications, online games have grown to a huge industry in recent years. Particularly, Massive Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVEs), which allow for simultaneous activity of thousands of players in a virtual world, have been tremendously successful. Current architectures, however, use centralized approaches, which obviously do not scale beyond a certain point. Distributed event-based systems are a promising approach to reach both, performing and scalable architectures. The potential of this approach can only be fully exploited if event semantics is used to optimize event handling. Existing approaches actually do this to some degree, but typically in a very application specific manner. There is no generally applicable framework for classifying events according to their relevant semantic properties. In this paper, we propose a generally applicable classification of events as a first step on the way to flexibly adaptable generic event management systems. We exemplify the relevance of our semantic properties by classifying typical events in an existing MMVE. We discuss existing optimization strategies based on our semantic classification and outline a corresponding architecture.

Alpha-Adaptive: Evolutionary Workflow Metadata in Distributed Document-Oriented Process Management

The α-Flow project enables process support in heterogeneous and inter-institutional scenarios in healthcare. α-Flow provides a distributed case file and represents workflow schemas as documents which are shared coequally to content documents. The activity progress and data flow is controlled by process-related metadata. A use case will motivate user-defined and demand-driven status attributes that are not known at design-time. α-Adaptive demonstrates how to apply the EAV data design approach and prototype-based programming concepts in order to provide an adaptive-evolutionary status attribute model for document-oriented processes.

OXDBS: extension of a native XML database system with validation by consistency checking of OWL-DL ontologies

Native XML database systems provide mature technology for persisting XML data and documents. Ontologies are often represented as XML-based documents like OWL-DL ontologies which allow for semantic consistency checking by formal description logic. Artificial intelligence provides reasoners as IT-support for consistency checking. Currently there exists no native XML database system which integrates logic reasoning for semantic consistency as addition to syntactic schema validation. The OXDBS project integrates a reasoner into a native XML database system, thus, allowing to assert consistency of ontological data at the most basic tier in an application environment.

A Light-Weight System Extension Supporting Document-Based Processes in Healthcare

Inadequate availability of patient information is a major cause for medical errors and affects costs in healthcare. Traditional information integration in healthcare does not solve the problem. Applying the classic diagnostic-therapeuthic cycle as the model for a document-oriented information exchange protocol allows to foster inter-institutional information exchange in healthcare. The goal of the proposed architecture is to provide information exchange between strict autonomous healthcare institutions, bridging the gap between primary and secondary care, following traditional paper-based working practice. The combination of a restful architecture with a distributed light-weight workflow model provides minimized requirement for participating systems.