•The paper describes the information system and interoperability related challenges, trends and issues that must be addressed to support a new generation of scientific-based and technological ...solutions for facilitating the collaboration of existing enterprise systems.•This paper presents general research priorities and directions of related to context-aware systems, semantic interoperability, cyber-physical systems, cloud-based systems and interoperability assessment.•The listed properties are used to propose the generic abstract architecture of the Next Generation Enterprise Information Systems.
The rapid changes in today's socio-economic and technological environment in which the enterprises operate necessitate the identification of new requirements that address both theoretical and practical aspects of the Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). Such an evolving environment contributes to both the process and the system complexity which cannot be handled by the traditional architectures. The constant pressure of requirements for more data, more collaboration and more flexibility motivates us to discuss about the concept of Next Generation EIS (NG EIS) which is federated, omnipresent, model-driven, open, reconfigurable and aware. All these properties imply that the future enterprise system is inherently interoperable. This position paper presents the discussion that spans several research challenges of future interoperable enterprise systems, specialized from the existing general research priorities and directions of IFAC Technical Committee 5.3,11IFAC Technical Committee 5.3 « Enterprise Integration and Networking », http://www.ifac-tc53.org namely: context-aware systems, semantic interoperability, cyber-physical systems, cloud-based systems and interoperability assessment.
Objective In early 2010, Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital began an interoperability project with the distinctive goal of developing a platform to enable medical applications to ...be written once and run unmodified across different healthcare IT systems. The project was called Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies (SMART).
Methods We adopted contemporary web standards for application programming interface transport, authorization, and user interface, and standard medical terminologies for coded data. In our initial design, we created our own openly licensed clinical data models to enforce consistency and simplicity. During the second half of 2013, we updated SMART to take advantage of the clinical data models and the application-programming interface described in a new, openly licensed Health Level Seven draft standard called Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR). Signaling our adoption of the emerging FHIR standard, we called the new platform SMART on FHIR.
Results We introduced the SMART on FHIR platform with a demonstration that included several commercial healthcare IT vendors and app developers showcasing prototypes at the Health Information Management Systems Society conference in February 2014. This established the feasibility of SMART on FHIR, while highlighting the need for commonly accepted pragmatic constraints on the base FHIR specification.
Conclusion In this paper, we describe the creation of SMART on FHIR, relate the experience of the vendors and developers who built SMART on FHIR prototypes, and discuss some challenges in going from early industry prototyping to industry-wide production use.
Interoperability stands as a critical hurdle in developing and overseeing distributed and collaborative systems. Thus, it becomes imperative to gain a deep comprehension of the primary obstacles ...hindering interoperability and the essential criteria that systems must satisfy to achieve it. In light of this objective, in the initial phase of this research, we conducted a survey questionnaire involving stakeholders and practitioners engaged in distributed and collaborative systems. This effort resulted in the identification of eight essential interoperability requirements, along with their corresponding challenges. Then, the second part of our study encompassed a critical review of the literature to assess the effectiveness of prevailing conceptual approaches and associated technologies in addressing the identified requirements. This analysis led to the identification of a set of components that promise to deliver the desired interoperability by addressing the requirements identified earlier. These elements subsequently form the foundation for the third part of our study, a reference architecture for interoperability-fostering frameworks that is proposed in this paper. The results of our research can significantly impact the software engineering of interoperable systems by introducing their fundamental requirements and the best practices to address them, but also by identifying the key elements of a framework facilitating interoperability in Systems of Systems.
•Sustaining interoperability in enterprise networks is the next research challenge.•Not understanding the impact of a single system change may cause network failures.•Pervasive information models and ...EA can support dynamic interoperability enablers.•Combined use of model-driven and knowledge-based approaches can improve NG-EIS.•We present and discuss the sustainable interoperability research framework.
In a turbulent world, global competition and the uncertainty of markets have led organizations and technology to evolve exponentially, surpassing the most imaginary scenarios predicted at the beginning of the digital manufacturing era, in the 1980s. Business paradigms have changed from a standalone vision into complex and collaborative ecosystems where enterprises break down organizational barriers to improve synergies with others and become more competitive. In this context, paired with networking and enterprise integration, enterprise information systems (EIS) interoperability gained utmost importance, ensuring an increasing productivity and efficiency thanks to a promise of more automated information exchange in networked enterprises scenarios. However, EIS are also becoming more dynamic. Interfaces that are valid today are outdated tomorrow, thus static interoperability enablers and communication software services are no longer the solution for the future. This paper is focused on the challenge of sustaining networked EIS interoperability, and takes up input from solid research initiatives in the areas of knowledge management and model driven development, to propose and discuss several research strategies and technological trends towards next EIS generation.
Information for Action! is a Joint Action (JA-InfAct) on Health Information promoted by the EU Member States and funded by the European Commission within the Third EU Health Programme (2014-2020) to ...create and develop solid sustainable infrastructure on EU health information. The main objective of this the JA-InfAct is to build an EU health information system infrastructure and strengthen its core elements by a) establishing a sustainable research infrastructure to support population health and health system performance assessment, b) enhancing the European health information and knowledge bases, as well as health information research capacities to reduce health information inequalities, and c) supporting health information interoperability and innovative health information tools and data sources.
Following a federated analysis approach, JA-InfAct developed an ad hoc federated infrastructure based on distributing a well-defined process-mining analysis methodology to be deployed at each participating partners' systems to reproduce the analysis and pool the aggregated results from the analyses. To overcome the legal interoperability issues on international data sharing, data linkage and management, partners (EU regions) participating in the case studies worked coordinately to query their real-world healthcare data sources complying with a common data model, executed the process-mining analysis pipeline on their premises, and shared the results enabling international comparison and the identification of best practices on stroke care.
The ad hoc federated infrastructure was designed and built upon open source technologies, providing partners with the capacity to exploit their data and generate dashboards exploring the stroke care pathways. These dashboards can be shared among the participating partners or to a coordination hub without legal issues, enabling the comparative evaluation of the caregiving activities for acute stroke across regions. Nonetheless, the approach is not free of a number of challenges that have been solved, and new challenges that should be addressed in the eventual case of scaling up. For that eventual case, 12 recommendations considering the different layers of interoperability have been provided.
The proposed approach, when successfully deployed as a federated analysis infrastructure, such as the one developed within the JA-InfAct, can concisely tackle all levels of the interoperability requirements from organisational to technical interoperability, supported by the close collaboration of the partners participating in the study. Any proposal for extension, should require further thinking on how to deal with new challenges on interoperability.
Heterogeneous device services generated by various devices in different contexts prevent users from efficiently and correctly consuming device services. This seriously hinders the development of ...Internet of Things. This paper addresses the problems appearing in device discovery and device interaction. It devises a user interoperability framework (UIF) to enable device users to interoperate with heterogeneous devices of different contexts with consistent syntax and semantics. In this framework, a new separation strategy is provided; a device representation method for real, common, and virtual devices is devised; and a device transformability model is proposed to guarantee the proper transformation of device syntax and semantics. To demonstrate the correctness of UIF, a UIF prototype is implemented and several experiment methods are compared to determine which one should be adopted as semantic relatedness computing tools in device discovery for device users and in common device publishing for device providers.
There is a paucity of literature that examines building information modelling (BIM) for asset management within the architecture, engineering, construction and owner-operated (AECO) sector. This ...paper therefore presents a thorough review of published literature on the latest research and standards development that impact upon BIM and its application in facilities management (FM) during the operations and maintenance (O&M) phase of building usage. The purpose is to generate new ideas and provide polemic clarity geared to intellectually challenge readers from across a range of academic and industrial disciplines. The findings reveal that significant challenges facing the FM sector include the need for: greater consideration of long-term strategic aspirations; amelioration of data integration/interoperability issues; augmented knowledge management; enhanced performance measurement; and enriched training and competence development for facilities managers to better deal with the amorphous range of services covered by FM. Future work is also proposed in several key areas and includes: case studies to observe and report upon current practice and development; and supplementary research related to concepts of knowledge capture in relation to FM and the growing use of BIM for asset management.
•For new buildings, research into BIM-FM integration is rare.•A review of developments and opportunities for BIM-FM integration is presented.•Challenges posed include interoperability, performance enhancement and training.•Future work seeks to produce commercial products and record contemporary practice.
Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) comprises vertically oriented platforms for things. Developers who want to use them need to negotiate access individually and adapt to the platform-specific API ...and information models. Having to perform these actions for each platform often outweighs the possible gains from adapting applications to multiple platforms. This fragmentation of the IoT and the missing interoperability result in high entry barriers for developers and prevent the emergence of broadly accepted IoT ecosystems. The BIG IoT (Bridging the Interoperability Gap of the IoT) project aims to ignite an IoT ecosystem as part of the European Platforms Initiative. As part of the project, researchers have devised an IoT ecosystem architecture. It employs five interoperability patterns that enable cross-platform interoperability and can help establish successful IoT ecosystems.
The scoping review reported by this article aimed to analyze the state of the art of the use of Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) in the development of homecare applications and was ...informed by the following research questions: (i) what type of homecare applications benefit from the use of FHIR?; (ii) what FHIR resources are being implemented?; (iii) what publicly available development tools are being used?; and (iv) how privacy and security issues are being addressed? An electronic search was conducted, and 27 studies were included in the scoping review after the selection process. The results show a current interest in using FHIR to implement: i) applications to provide interoperable measurement devices for home monitoring; (ii) applications to remotely collected Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROM); (iii) Personal Health Records (PHR); and (iv) specific applications for self-management. According to the results, the FHIR resources being implemented are quite diverse and contribute for the challenge of handling the variability caused by diverse healthcare processes. However, the use of publicly available development tools (e.g., SMART on FHIR or HAPI) is not yet generalized. Moreover, just a small number of studies reported the validation of the implemented resources using publicly available FHIR validators. Finally, in terms of privacy and security issues, different approaches were identified: authentication and authorizations mechanisms, end-to-end encrypted messaging mechanisms, and decentralized management and audit trail based on blockchain technologies.
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