Report of conference track 2: pathways to open architectures

Abstract

The goal of open architectures is to establish the conditions for building coherent and comprehensive systems out of components and to minimize the effort needed to integrate different components. Yet, it has become apparent that there are different perceptions concerning the notion of a ‘component’, especially in terms of granularity and scope. There are also different views concerning the desirable degree of autonomy of a component. With respect to the requirement that a component should be substitutable, an inclusive definition would consider a component as ‘an element of the health information system (HIS) that can be replaced by another element without strongly affecting the rest of the system, provided that it has the same technical , syntactical and semantic interface and the same dependencies ’. This pragmatic definition recognizes that the interchangeability of components can range from ‘plug-and-play’ to ‘modify-and-reuse’. 2. Building a component-based HIS