Yildiray Kabak

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.

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.

Exploiting ebXML registry semantic constructs for handling archetype metadata in healthcare informatics

Using archetypes is a promising approach in providing semantic interoperability among healthcare systems. To realise archetype based interoperability, the healthcare systems need to discover the existing archetypes, based on their semantics; annotate their archetypes with ontologies; compose templates from archetypes and retrieve corresponding data from the underlying medical information systems. In this paper, we describe how ebXML Registry semantic constructs can be used for annotating, storing, discovering and retrieving archetypes. For semantic annotation of archetypes, we present an example of an archetype metadata ontology and describe the techniques to access archetype semantics through ebXML query facilities. We present a GUI query facility and describe how the stored procedures, which we introduce, move the semantic support beyond what is currently available in ebXML registries. We also address how archetype data can be retrieved from clinical information systems by using ebXML web services. A comparison of web service technology with the ebXML messaging system is provided to justify the reasons for using web services.

Enhancing ebXML Registries to Make them OWL Aware

AbstractebXML is a standard from OASIS and UN/CEFACT which specifies an infrastructure to facilitate electronic business. In this paper, we address how ebXML registry semantics support can be further enhanced to make it OWL aware. OWL constructs are represented through ebXML registry information model constructs, and stored procedures are defined in the ebXML registry for processing the OWL semantics. These predefined stored queries provide the necessary means to exploit the enhanced semantics stored in the registry. In this way, an application program does not have to be aware of the details of how this semantics support is achieved in ebXML registry, and does not have to contain additional code to process this semantics.We believe that this approach is quite powerful to associate semantics with registry objects: it becomes possible to retrieve knowledge through queries, the enhancements to the registry are generic and also the registry specification is kept intact. The capabilities provided move the semantics support beyond what is currently available in ebXML registries and it does so by using a standard ontology language.To be able to demonstrate the benefits of the enhancements, we also show how the resulting semantics can be made use of in Web service discovery and composition.

A survey and analysis of electronic business document standards

No document standard is sufficient for all purposes because the requirements significantly differ among businesses, industries, and geopolitical regions. On the other hand, the ultimate aim of business document interoperability is to exchange business data among partners without any prior agreements related to the document syntax and semantics. Therefore, an important characteristic of a document standard is its ability to adapt to different contexts, its extensibility, and its customization. The UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS) is an important landmark in this direction. In this article, we present a survey and an analysis of some of the prominent UN/CEFACT CCTS-based electronic document standards. We describe their document design principles and discuss how they handle customization and extensibility. We address their industry relevance and the recent efforts for their harmonization and convergence. We conclude by mentioning some emerging efforts for the semantic interoperability of different document standards.

Improving the Functionality of UDDI Registries through Web Service Semantics

In this paper we describe a framework for exploiting the semantics of Web services through UDDI registries. As a part of this framework, we extend the DAML-S upper ontology to describe the functionality we find essential for e-businesses. This functionality includes relating the services with electronic catalogs, describing the complementary services and finding services according to the properties of products or services. Once the semantics is defined, there is a need for a mechanism in the service registry to relate it with the service advertised. The ontology model developed is general enough to be used with any service registry. However when it comes to relating the semantics with services advertised, the capabilities provided by the registry effects how this is achieved. We demonstrate how to integrate the described service semantics to UDDI registries.

A platform for agent behavior design and multi agent orchestration

Agents show considerable promise as a new paradigm for software development. However for wider adoption and deployment of agent technology, powerful design and development tools are needed. Such tools should empower software developers to cater agent solutions more efficiently and at a lower cost for their customers with rapidly changing requirements and differing application specifications. In this paper, an agent orchestration platform that allows the developers to design a complete agent-based scenario through graphical user interfaces is presented. The scenario produced by the platform is a rule based system in contrast to the existing systems where agents are coded through a programming language. In this way, the platform provides a higher level of abstraction to agent development making it easier to adapt to rapidly changing user requirements or differing software specifications. The system is highly transportable and interoperable. The platform helps to design a multi-agent system either from scratch, or by adapting existing distributed systems to multi agent systems. It contains tools that handle the agent system design both at the macro level, that is, defining the interaction between agents and at the micro level which deals with internal design of agents. Agent behaviour is modeled as a workflow of basic agent behaviour building blocks (such as receiving a message, invoking an application, making a decision or sending a message) by considering the data and control dependencies among them, and a graphical user interface is provided to construct agent behaviours. The platform allows agent templates to be constructed from previously defined behaviours. Finally through a Scenario Design Tool, a multi-agent system is designed by specifying associations among agents. The scenario is stored in a knowledge base by using the Agent Behaviour Representation Language (ABRL) which is developed for this purpose. Finally to be able to demonstrate the execution of the system on a concrete agent platform, we mapped the ABRL rules to JESS and executed the system on JADE.

Collaborative Business Process Support in eHealth: Integrating IHE Profiles Through ebXML Business Process Specification Language

Integrating healthcare enterprise (IHE) specifies integration profiles describing selected real world use cases to facilitate the interoperability of healthcare information resources. While realizing a complex real-world scenario, IHE profiles are combined by grouping the related IHE actors. Grouping IHE actors implies that the associated business processes (IHE profiles) that the actors are involved must be combined, that is, the choreography of the resulting collaborative business process must be determined by deciding on the execution sequence of transactions coming from different profiles. There are many IHE profiles and each user or vendor may support a different set of IHE profiles that fits to its business need. However, determining the precedence of all the involved transactions manually for each possible combination of the profiles is a very tedious task. In this paper, we describe how to obtain the overall business process automatically when IHE actors are grouped. For this purpose, we represent the IHE profiles through a standard, machine-processable language, namely, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) ebusiness eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML) Business Process Specification (ebBP) Language. We define the precedence rules among the transactions of the IHE profiles, again, in a machine-processable way. Then, through a graphical tool, we allow users to select the actors to be grouped and automatically produce the overall business process in a machine-processable format.