Cross Enterprise Research Articles

Інтеграція та композиція сервісів на основі моделі

In the paper we would like to introduce a frame- work for designing and developing Semantic Web Service application that integrates a several enterprises and composes results from a different services by applying techniques, methodologies and notations provided by Software Engineering and Business process modeling. We propose to use existing business modeling techniques (BPMN, BPLWS, OWL-S, WSDL, WebML) for modeling the cross enterprise processes, for enterprise integrations and web service compositions. The main purpose is to designing and developing semantically rich Web applications, with semiautomatic defining semantic descriptions from the business process model that increase the efficiency of design and decrease the extra work necessary for processing semantically annotated information which passing through the enterprises.

Best practice of Rendering CDA in a Cross Enterprise Document Sharing Environment

While much has been written about the clinical document architecture and the challenges on semantic interoper- ability, the modelling of content and the implementation, little attention has been paid to the representation of the medical payload in CDA documents and its implications on usability and accessibility. The authors compare di erent methods to display CDA documents in a cross enterprise environment on the example of the Austrian national patient health record system. Strategies and decisions as well as technological approach and security implications are presented. Finally, a combination of PDF/A-3 and attached CDA doc- ument is proposed as a best practice method for future implementations.

A framework for integration of heterogeneous medical imaging networks.

Medical imaging is increasing its importance in matters of medical diagnosis and in treatment support. Much is due to computers that have revolutionized medical imaging not only in acquisition process but also in the way it is visualized, stored, exchanged and managed. Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) is an example of how medical imaging takes advantage of computers. To solve problems of interoperability of PACS and medical imaging equipment, the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard was defined and widely implemented in current solutions. More recently, the need to exchange medical data between distinct institutions resulted in Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative that contains a content profile especially conceived for medical imaging exchange: Cross Enterprise Document Sharing for imaging (XDS-i). Moreover, due to application requirements, many solutions developed private networks to support their services. For instance, some applications support enhanced query and retrieve over DICOM objects metadata.This paper proposes anintegration framework to medical imaging networks that provides protocols interoperability and data federation services. It is an extensible plugin system that supports standard approaches (DICOM and XDS-I), but is also capable of supporting private protocols. The framework is being used in the Dicoogle Open Source PACS.

Factor Influencing Women’s Involvement in Agricultural Programme of the National Special Programme on Food Security in Niger State, Nigeria

The study investigates factors influencing women participation in National Special Programme on Food Security in the three project sites of Niger state. A purposive sampling technique was used to select 103 participants from the three sites. Cross sectional data obtained using structured logit regression model to determine factors influencing women’s participation in NSPFS in the study area. Finding revealed that most (71%) of the participants are middle-aged and still active in agricultural production. Majority (87.4%) of the participants involved in the programme are married, thus, contributing to the family welfare in cash and kind. The result indicated that the majority (71.9%) of the participants had non-formal education, with an average household size of 8.7% . In addition, the result indicated that 55.9% participate in cross enterprises, (30.2%) participate in livestock production, and (13.7%) participate in marketing. Keywords : Marketing, Food, Women, Niger, Agriculture

A New Framework for Mapping Business Domain Ontologies

In cross enterprise collaboration, business domains need to interoperate and collaborate to each other for receiving profits. To create an understanding of enterprises and the ways they do business, a starting point could be business models. The goal of business modeling is to create semantically representations of business domain concepts like transactions, processes, value chains. Business domain ontologies can be used as a reference model for concrete business models. Business domain ontology describes concepts, concept relations and axioms that are potentially relevant for business models. The three main business modeling ontologies are REA, the e-value ontology and the Business Model Ontology (BMO). In this paper, a mapping is proposed between these three well known business domain ontologies (REA, e-value and BMO). The proposed mapping helps business domains with different ontologies in a cross enterprise collaboration, to be understandable and interoperable, but it does not force each business domain to have a common vocabulary and a unique ontology in order to be interoperable to each other. General Terms Business domain ontology mapping.

EMOLST: a documentation flow for distributed health informatics

AbstractElectronic Health Records (EHRs) have many potential advantages over traditional paper records, such as wide scale access, error checking, and protection from physical damage to a record. As with any medical record, paper or electronic, both the patient's privacy and the document's integrity must be guaranteed. With initiatives such as Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), computerized healthcare systems are able to share EHRs on a large scale, while protecting the patient's privacy rights. However, IHE does not yet meet the needs of all healthcare systems, as we will show with the eMOLST project. The eMOLST project delivers software in support of Medical Order for Life Sustaining Treatment (MOLST) forms and uses IHE specifications for cross enterprise document storage and sharing, patient identification, and user authentication and authorization. The Web‐based system provides secure access to electronic MOLST documents regardless of the patient's or healthcare provider's location. The eMOLST project allows a user to have Single Sign On (SSO) access to the system from either the user's associated enterprise, or through a Web portal shared amongst all users across all enterprises. In this paper, we show a security solution to allow SSO from multiple access points for IHE compliant systems. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

IHE cross-enterprise document sharing for imaging: interoperability testing software

BackgroundWith the deployments of Electronic Health Records (EHR), interoperability testing in healthcare is becoming crucial. EHR enables access to prior diagnostic information in order to assist in health decisions. It is a virtual system that results from the cooperation of several heterogeneous distributed systems. Interoperability between peers is therefore essential. Achieving interoperability requires various types of testing. Implementations need to be tested using software that simulates communication partners, and that provides test data and test plans.ResultsIn this paper we describe a software that is used to test systems that are involved in sharing medical images within the EHR. Our software is used as part of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) testing process to test the Cross Enterprise Document Sharing for imaging (XDS-I) integration profile. We describe its architecture and functionalities; we also expose the challenges encountered and discuss the elected design solutions.ConclusionsEHR is being deployed in several countries. The EHR infrastructure will be continuously evolving to embrace advances in the information technology domain. Our software is built on a web framework to allow for an easy evolution with web technology. The testing software is publicly available; it can be used by system implementers to test their implementations. It can also be used by site integrators to verify and test the interoperability of systems, or by developers to understand specifications ambiguities, or to resolve implementations difficulties.

IHE profiles applied to regional PACS

PACS has been widely adopted as an image storage solution that perfectly fits the radiology department workflow and that can be easily extended to other hospital departments. Integrations with other hospital systems, like the Radiology Information System, the Hospital Information System and the Electronic Patient Record are fully achieved but still challenging aims. PACS also creates the perfect environment for teleradiology and teleworking setups. One step further is the regional PACS concept where different hospitals or health care enterprises share the images in an integrated Electronic Patient Record. Among the different solutions available to share images between different hospitals IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) organization presents the Cross Enterprise Document Sharing profile (XDS) which allows sharing images from different hospitals even if they have different PACS vendors. Adopting XDS has multiple advantages, images do not need to be duplicated in a central archive to be shared among the different healthcare enterprises, they only need to be indexed and published in a central document registry. In the XDS profile IHE defines the mechanisms to publish and index the images in the central document registry. It also defines the mechanisms that each hospital will use to retrieve those images regardless on the Hospital PACS they are stored.

Process chains in cross enterprise production: a module-based design framework

In recent years, the emergence of various new concepts in cross enterprise production, which focus on different market conditions and objectives, has been observed. Systems supply and consignment storage represent prominent examples. The design and implementation of enterprise specific concepts explores the individual potential of cross enterprise production successfully by the provision of individual process models. Both a multitude of alternative process chain models, as well as a suitable methodology for individual process chain design, is thereby required. In this paper, a module-base design framework for process chains in cross enterprise production introduces the use of the extended integrated production process model (eIPPM). Based both on the provision of process modules and design rules as the main contribution of the eIPPM as well as a detailed design methodology, the design of individual process chains in cross enterprise production becomes possible. Thereby, the enterprise specific process and task allocation represents one of the major design elements. Finally, we present two case studies to verify the individual applicability.

Electronic supply network coordination in agrifood networks: Barriers, potentials, and path dependencies

Supply chain management (SCM) has emerged as cross functional, cross company concept to improve coordination of entire value chains through coordinated actions of all companies. It has received a major push from the availability of internet-based information and communication technologies. The conditions in certain sectors are favorable for a realization of chain wide SCM. In other sectors, however, conditions are more complex and companies and value chains still struggle to exploit the potentials from SCM, in particular when it comes to cross enterprise coordination. This paper analyses the case of a complex supply network and follows the research question why complex networks do not exploit the potentials from cross enterprise SCM.

Enhancing IHE XDS for Federated Clinical Affinity Domain Support

One of the key problems in healthcare informatics is the inability to share patient records across enterprises. To address this problem, an important industry initiative called "integrating the healthcare enterprise (IHE)" specified the "cross enterprise document sharing (XDS)" profile. In the IHE XDS, healthcare enterprises that agree to work together form a "clinical affinity domain" and store healthcare documents in an ebXML registry/repository architecture to facilitate their sharing. The affinity domains also agree on a common set of policies such as coding lists to be used to annotate clinical documents in the registry/repository and the common schemes for patient identification. However, since patients expect their records to follow them as they move from one clinical affinity domain to another, there is a need for affinity domains to be federated to enable information exchange. In this paper, we describe how IHE XDS can be enhanced to support federated clinical affinity domains. We demonstrate that federation of affinity domains are facilitated when ontologies, rather than coding term lists, are used to annotate clinical documents. Furthermore, we describe a patient identification protocol that eliminates the need to keep a master patient index file for the federation.

Cost based web services transaction management

There is an increasing trend of using web services for automation of cross enterprise business processes. The predominantly used transactional framework ensures process reliability via consistent state changes across participants, but unpredictable response times are difficult to handle. Long Running Transactions (LRTs) may require bookings/locks across business boundaries for a long time before the final outcome is determined. Participants use timeouts to protect themselves from the consequences of an unsuccessful LRT, but this entails that the longer a transaction runs the greater the chance for it to fail. This paper proposes monetary semantics in bookings to increase the success rate for LRTs. We claim that this can increase the chances of success without compromising the loosely coupled autonomous nature of web services.

EMarketplaces for enterprise and cross enterprise integration

Businesses today must collaborate more frequently with partners to build virtual organizations and supply-chains that reduce times-to-market and costs. This paper argues that an electronic marketplace ( eMarketplace) is a promising model for eBusiness applications. The architecture for this integrated environment is business-centric and knowledge-oriented. In this architecture, the eMarketplace exists as a collection of economically motivated software agents of cooperative distributed systems. It enables and supports common integration and economic services between market participants. This paper focuses on developing an agent-oriented dynamic trading mechanism (Vickrey auction) and supply-chain integration for the eMarketplace. A prototype is developed for a Vickrey eMarketplace using a coordinated, intelligent rational Agent model and a FIPA-compliant platform.