Interoperability Challenges Research Articles

Is Fragmentation a Threat to the Success of the Internet of Things?

Internet of Things (IoT) aims to bring connectivity to almost every objects, i.e., things, found in the physical space. It extends connectivity to everyday things, however, such increase in the connectivity creates many prominent challenges. Context: Generally, IoT opens the door for new applications for machine-to-machine and human-to-human communications. The current trend of collaborating, distributed teams through the Internet, mobile communications, and autonomous entities, e.g., robots, is the first phase of the IoT to develop and deliver diverse services and applications. However, such collaborations is threatened by the fragmentation that we witness in the industry nowadays as it brings difficulty to integrate the diverse technologies of the various objects found in IoT systems. Diverse technologies induce interoperability issues while designing and developing various services and applications, hence, limiting the possibility of reusing the data, more specifically, the software (including frameworks, firmware, applications programming interfaces, and user interfaces) as well as of facing issues, like security threats and bugs, when developing new services or applications. Different aspects of handling data collection ranging from discovering smart sensors for data collection, integrating and applying reasoning on them must be available to provide interoperability and flexibility to the diverse objects interacting in the system. However, such approaches are bound to be challenged in future IoT scenarios as they bring substantial performance impairments in settings with the very large number of collaborating devices and technologies. Objective: We raise the awareness of the community about the lack of interoperability among technologies developed for IoT and challenges that their integration poses. We also provide guidelines for researchers and practitioners interested in connecting IoT networks and devices to develop services and applications. Method: We apply the methods advocated by the evidence-based software engineering paradigm. This paradigm and its core tool, the systematic literature review (SLR), were introduced to the software-engineering research community early 2004 to help researchers and industry systematically and objectively gather and aggregate evidences about different topics. In this paper, we conduct an SLR of both IoT interoperability issues and the state-of-practice of IoT technologies in the industry, highlighting the integration challenges related to the IoT that have significantly shifted the landscape of Internet-based collaborative services and applications nowadays. Results: Our SLR identifies a number of studies from journals, conferences, and workshops with the highest quality in the field. This SLR reports different trends, including frameworks and technologies, for the IoT for better comprehension of the paradigm and discusses the integration and interoperability challenges across the different layers of this technology while shedding light on the current IoT state-of-practice. It also discusses some future research directions for the community.

Semantic SPA Framework for situational Student-Project Allocation in Education

Web 3.0 technologies have redefined the way classical problems in education are solved. The classical problems are constrained by interoperability challenges that can be addressed using semantic technologies. Student-project allocation (SPA) is one such classical problem in education, whose solution lies in finding a stable matching between student-project pairs. Although many methods exist to solve the SPA problem, recent developments in higher education, such as globalisation, has triggered interoperability challenge because of diversity in student and expert availability across disciplines, campuses, and universities. The author proposes the semantic SPA framework that addresses the interoperability challenge, by leveraging the existing semantic investments made by the educational institutions. The framework standardises the SPA data elements formally using semantic Web concepts, proposes reference ontology for the situational SPA problem, and adopts a semantic Web service approach, using OWL-S, for development. The OWL-S specification enables the automatic discovery, composition, and invocation of the Web services by educational Institutions or semantic agents on the Web, for situational SPA scenarios.

Challenges of Medical Records Interoperability in Developing Countries: A Case Study of the University Teaching Hospital in Zambia

The University Teaching Hospital (UTH) is an integral national referral Hospital made up of eight departments. Standardized systems and semantic interoperability is key for successful flow of patient information from one department to another and from section to section within a department. Lack of a SNOMED CT E.H.R System in surgery departments causes inefficient scheduling of surgical procedures, insufficient and inaccurate pertinent patient historical information, misconceptions and error arising from ambiguities in terminology usage. The result is unhealthy clinician working environment leading to high death rates among patients. Baseline Survey was conducted using questionnaire to establish the major drawbacks of the current manual system in use at the department. Record inspection was done followed by roundtable discussion with stakeholder. Convenient sampling was used, out of 40 respondents 72.5% had computers in their section, 27.5% did not have, 60% were using partial electronic records and paper based, 37.5% were using manual system, 2.5% reported that they were using electronic record system. The result reviewed more than 50% of the medical practitioner ranging from nurses to surgeon reported to be dissatisfied with the current system. In addition, record inspection was conducted by going to each section of the department to understand the business process and the form and format of data storage; this exercise reviewed redundancy in the capture, storage and management of patient records due to the fact that in every section where a patient pass, while undergoing diagnosis procedure, basic details are collected afresh for the same patient. This situation has brought about unnecessary duplication of work. The other drawback is the storage of patient records arising from lack of storage space. Record which are ten years old are destroyed to create space for new ones. This destruction of records robs researchers of the much-needed data for trends analysis and patient disease history. Because of these draw backs, it is very apparent that a standardized E.H.R is implemented.

An Ontology for Detailed Measurement of Building Works Using Semantic Web Technology

Researchers have explored the integration of BIM and Semantic Web to solve the problem of interoperability, and key to the Semantic Web is an ontology of a domain. To address interoperability challenges associated to cost estimating previous studies are yet to consider ontologies based on detailed measurement standards for building works. This study develops ontology for detailed measurement of building construction works. A design science research approach was employed for the study, appropriate tools and BIM software systems were identified and based on that, a methontology was used to develop the ontology based on the Building and Engineering Standard Method of Measurement 4 (BESMM4). BESMM4 is the Nigerian Standard Method of Measurement that provides fundamental guidance on the detailed measurement and description of building works. To make sure the ontology is fit for purpose, a descriptive logic-based reasoner was used to syntactically check the ontology while a 4D BIM modelling software (Navisworks) was used on a case study building to verify the proposed ontology.

A Data-Centric Internet of Things Framework Based on Azure Cloud

Internet of Things (IoT) has been found pervasive use cases and become a driving force to constitute a digital society. The ultimate goal of IoT is data and the intelligence generated from data. With the progress in public cloud computing technologies, more and more data can be stored, processed and analyzed in cloud to release the power of IoT. However, due to the heterogeneity of hardware and communication protocols in the IoT world, the interoperability and compatibility among different link layer protocols, sub-systems, and back-end services have become a significant challenge to IoT practices. This challenge cannot be addressed by public cloud suppliers since their efforts are mainly put into software and platform services but can hardly be extended to end devices. In this paper, we propose a data-centric IoT framework that incorporates three promising protocols with fundamental security schemes, i.e., WiFi, Thread, and LoRaWAN, to cater to massive IoT and broadband IoT use cases in local, personal, and wide area networks. By taking advantages of the Azure cloud infrastructure, the framework features a unified device management model and data model to conquer the interoperability challenge. We also provide implementation and a case study to validate the framework for practical applications.

Requirements for developing interoperable e-government systems in developing countries - a case of Uganda

E-government initiatives in developing countries still suffer from lack of interoperability, despite the existence of e-government interoperability frameworks in literature. For example, Uganda's e-government landscape is fragmented within and across agencies. To provide preliminary insights into addressing this, exploratory interviews were conducted to investigate why the e-government interoperability challenge prevails in Uganda, and findings were used with respect to existing literature to specify required strategic interventions. These strategic interventions point to the need for three intertwined capabilities, i.e., a regulatory and governance framework, a capacity building and sustainability framework, and an adaptation and customisation framework for e-government implementations. Therefore, the relevance of this paper is two-fold. First, to give insight into strategic interventions that developing economies (that share Uganda's context) can explore to address e-government interoperability. Second, to stimulate researchers in countries that have attained e-government interoperability to publish detailed technical guidelines on implementing the strategic interventions proposed herein.

Service Management for IoT: Requirements, Taxonomy, Recent Advances and Open Research Challenges

The exponential growth in the number of smart devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), and associated with various IoT-based smart applications and services, raises interoperability challenges which could affect the sustainability of IoT services. IoT software applications are built using different software platforms and embedded in diverse types of terminals and sensing devices. Aiming to offer smart services over a range of network technologies that use different communication protocols. The concept of Web service with service-oriented solutions was introduced to cope with the heterogeneity of hardware and software, and to tackle issues of interoperability, flexibility and scalability. The main step of this solution was the integration of Web of Things technologies into smart device networks, with the utilization of IoT gateways. Service management is a crucial factor in sustaining service-oriented solutions in dynamic and highly scalable IoT systems, and is concerned with several issues associated with service provisioning, orchestration, composition and adaption. This work was motivated by the need for robust and flexible service management systems that can meet the requirements for the rapid scalability and heterogeneity associated with the exponential growth of IoT systems. In the literature there is no survey of service management issues and associated research efforts in the field of IoT. In this article, we identify the key requirements for managing IoT services as well as common service management platforms for IoT. We provide a thematic taxonomy based on the important factors, and investigate recent advances in service management for IoT systems. Finally, the major challenges that remain open are presented as a guide for future research directions.

Magipass

The North Carolina Turnpike Authority has become the first tolling agency in the USA to crack the tri-protocol interoperability challenge, and in doing so is waving a wand that will change the future of tolling across the USA

A Review of Interoperability Standards for Industry 4.0.

One aspect of Industry 4.0 incorporates data science and analytical models to analyse real time production data from multiple sources such as production machines, systems and processes and to accumulate these elements into an automated manufacturing system [1]. To realise this vision of Industry 4.0, one of the main requirements is to achieve interconnectivity across a diverse set of devices [2] and to acquire and integrate large amounts of data which can be used to inform production decisions [3]. However, one of the main challenges in implementing this solution is establishing interoperability with each device, which is primarily associated with a lack of standardisation available [4]. This is a particularly pressing issue as new devices by different manufacturers are continuously being released presenting an ongoing challenge in establishing uniform interoperability. In total there are over 300 platforms for IoT solutions, with new applications continuously being developed [5]. Thus, in this area there are a wide range of platforms, architectures and frameworks [6]. The importance of solving these interoperability challenges have been identified in the Insight report by the World Economic Forum, which outlined the need to resolve these issues not solely at a national level but globally, in order to implement Industry 4.0. To achieve this aim requires the establishment of global standards which is an ongoing task [7]. The focus of this paper is to examine the progress that is being made in order to establish interoperability across a diverse set of systems and also to identify the challenges in establishing this level of interoperability. To achieve this a literature review of current Industry 4.0 technologies and current interoperability standards was be undertaken, to identify and categorise potential frameworks capable of providing an Industry 4.0 global interoperability standard.

Quantitative analysis of manual annotation of clinical text samples

BackgroundSemantic interoperability of eHealth services within and across countries has been the main topic in several research projects. It is a key consideration for the European Commission to overcome the complexity of making different health information systems work together. This paper describes a study within the EU-funded project ASSESS CT, which focuses on assessing the potential of SNOMED CT as core reference terminology for semantic interoperability at European level. ObjectiveThis paper presents a quantitative analysis of the results obtained in ASSESS CT to determine the fitness of SNOMED CT for semantic interoperability. MethodsThe quantitative analysis consists of concept coverage, term coverage and inter-annotator agreement analysis of the annotation experiments related to six European languages (English, Swedish, French, Dutch, German and Finnish) and three scenarios: (i) ADOPT, where only SNOMED CT was used by the annotators; (ii) ALTERNATIVE, where a fixed set of terminologies from UMLS, excluding SNOMED CT, was used; and (iii) ABSTAIN, where any terminologies available in the current national infrastructure of the annotators’ country were used. For each language and each scenario, we configured the different terminology settings of the annotation experiments. ResultsThere was a positive correlation between the number of concepts in each terminology setting and their concept and term coverage values. Inter-annotator agreement is low, irrespective of the terminology setting. ConclusionsNo significant differences were found between the analyses for the three scenarios, but availability of SNOMED CT for the assessed language is associated with increased concept coverage. Terminology setting size and concept and term coverage correlate positively up to a limit where more concepts do not significantly impact the coverage values. The results did not confirm the hypothesis of an inverse correlation between concept coverage and IAA due to a lower amount of choices available. The overall low IAA results pose a challenge for interoperability and indicate the need for further research to assess whether consistent terminology implementation is possible across Europe, e.g., improving term coverage by adding localized versions of the selected terminologies, analysing causes of low inter-annotator agreement, and improving tooling and guidance for annotators. The much lower term coverage for the Swedish version of SNOMED CT compared to English together with the similarly high concept coverage obtained with English and Swedish SNOMED CT reflects its relevance as a hub to connect user interface terminologies and serving a variety of user needs.

A study on the factors affect to technological adoption of e-Government Information System interoperability in Vietnam

Information system interoperability has an important role for e- Government development, specially in term of Public management information system. Each country has its own strategy in ensuring interoperability in information system. Nowadays, archiving interoperability among information system is very complex task. In developing countries, the building information system ensuring interoperability in public organizations is limited and ineffective. Moreover, without deeply understanding and determinance on interoperability dimensions, it will become a challenge for interoperability and E- Government implementation. Therefore, this study aims to investigate and analyze the interoperability factors which affect the adoption of Vietnam e-Government Information Systems interoperability. Moreover, data was gathered using survey through distributing questionnaires to the employees of IT departments in Vietnam public organizations. The data was analyzed through the technique of Structural equation modeling (SEM). The result shows that Risk Management, Collaboration and Coordination, Technical Expertise have significantly influence on Interoperability adoption in Government Information System in Vietnam.

Smart health record management with secure NFC-enabled mobile devices

Abstract Patients with dispersed health records face the challenge of accessing readily available health history and mobility across different hospitals. It can hinder timely diagnosis and treatment, especially in the case of an emergency or for travellers. Cloud-based solutions have open challenges of interoperability and integration, higher challenges for security and privacy and may lack 24/7 support for the high availability of health history. Existing portable systems store limited health information for only a specific hospital and do not support mobility of patients across different hospitals. In this paper, we propose a next-generation portable Smart Health Record Management system with secure Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled mobile devices to retain the dispersed health records on an S-MAPLE (Secure Mobility-Assisted PortabLE) health folder. It provides secure yet easy access to up to date health history and assists patient mobility across hospitals. An NFC-based Host Card Emulation (HCE) mode maintains a software-based contactless mobile-based health wallet on the patient׳s mobile device. An authorized medical professional can access it directly and selectively with their mobile devices, over low energy wireless interfaces of NFC and Bluetooth. NFC provides secure proof-of-locality and ease of access. A tamper-resistant storage Secure Element (SE), end-to-end mutual authentication with attestation scheme, variant of the Ciphertext-policy Attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme and backup on a secure digital vault further secure the S-MAPLE health folder. We present the system requirements, system architecture and security requirements with a brief overview of the security solutions for the proposed health system. The implementation and performance of the system prototype using mid-range Android-based mobile devices has acceptable results.

A template framework for environmental timeseries data acquisition

Environmental timeseries data variety is exploding in the Internet of Things era, making data reuse a very demanding task. Data acquisition and integration remains a laborious step of the environmental data lifecycle. Environmental data heterogeneity is a persistent issue, as data are becoming available through different protocols and stored under diverse, custom formats. In this work, we deal with syntactic heterogeneity in environmental timeseries data. Our approach is based on describing different dataset syntaxes using abstract representations, called templates. We designed and implemented EDAM (Environmental Data Acquisition Module), a template framework that facilitates timeseries data acquisition and integration. EDAM templates are written using programming language-agnostic semantics, and can be reused both for input and output, thus enabling data reuse via transformations across different formats. We demonstrate EDAM generality in seven case studies, which involve scraping online data, extracting observations from a relational database, or aggregating historical timeseries stored in local files. Case studies span different environmental sciences domains, including meteorology, agriculture, urban air quality and hydrology. We also demonstrate EDAM for data dissemination, as instructed by output templates. We identified several syntactic interoperability challenges though the case studies, that include managing with differences in formatting observables, temporal and spatial references, and metadata documentation, and addressed them with EDAM. EDAM implementation has been released under an open-source license.

The state, all at sea: Interoperability and the Global Network of Navies

The sea has long been envisioned as antithetical to land, and therefore geography and the state. The Global Network of Navies is a Pentagon-led program that seeks to extend state power over the seas by cultivating naval interoperability. Interoperability has been a source of American military might since Second World War, but took on heightened importance after the Cold War. In this paper, I make three related arguments. First, I argue that the Global Network of Navies is an attempt to produce ocean space within a U.S.-led, but ultimately transnational, state assemblage. Second, I argue that this project relies on the materiality of the sea to affectively nudge forward transnational cooperation. Third, I argue that this reliance on the materiality of the sea is paradoxical, as the Global Network of Navies attempts (and ultimately fails) to dematerialize ocean space into abstract network ontology. To make these arguments, I first theorize interoperability through assemblage, highlighting how a transnational state assemblage emerges that works through, but is not reducible to, individual states. I then trace a genealogy of maritime space, showing how maritime space was assembled with U.S. naval technologies and strategies in the 19th and 20th centuries, culminating in the Global Network of Navies. Next, I examine the technical challenges of naval interoperability, focusing on C4ISR technologies. The sea’s materiality limits flows of data that have become synonymous with today’s warfighting. Many of the Pentagon’s potential partners lack the high-end technology required to be interoperable with the U.S. The C4ISR technology that is therefore distributed to partners is both technical and political; the U.S. remains central to data fusion and distribution. I then return to the sea itself, showing how the Global Network of Navies tries to dematerialize the sea but ultimately runs aground on the shoals of materiality. What remains is a smaller, fragmented spatiality that remains oriented around specific seas.

Digital Technologies for Forest Supply Chain Optimization: Existing Solutions and Future Trends

The role of digital technologies for fostering sustainability and efficiency in forest-based supply chains is well acknowledged and motivated several studies in the scope of precision forestry. Sensor technologies can collect relevant data in forest-based supply chains, comprising all activities from within forests and the production of the woody raw material to its transformation into marketable forest-based products. Advanced planning systems can help to support decisions of the various entities in the supply chain, e.g., forest owners, harvest companies, haulage companies, and forest product processing industry. Such tools can help to deal with the complex interdependencies between different entities, often with opposing objectives and actions-which may increase efficiency of forest-based supply chains. This paper analyzes contemporary literature dealing with digital technologies in forest-based supply chains and summarizes the state-of-the-art digital technologies for real-time data collection on forests, product flows, and forest operations, as well as planning systems and other decision support systems in use by supply chain actors. Higher sustainability and efficiency of forest-based supply chains require a seamless information flow to foster integrated planning of the activities over the supply chain-thereby facilitating seamless data exchange between the supply chain entities and foster new forms of collaboration. Therefore, this paper deals with data exchange and multi-entity collaboration aspects in combination with interoperability challenges related with the integration among multiple process data collection tools and advanced planning systems. Finally, this interdisciplinary review leads to the discussion of relevant guidelines that can guide future research and integration projects in this domain.

Building performance evaluation using OpenMath and Linked Data

A pronounced gap often exists between expected and actual building performance. The multi-faceted and cross lifecycle causes of this performance gap are found in design assumptions, construction issues and commissioning and operational compromises. Some important factors are firmly rooted in the lack of interoperability around building information. New solutions to the interoperability challenge offer the potential to leverage and reuse available heterogeneous data in a manner that can significantly assist building performance assessment. Linked data provides an open, modular and extensible solution for the challenge. However, in the buildings domain, the integration of rule-based performance metrics and contextual information has yet to be formally established. This paper describes an approach to the provision of in-depth building performance assessment through the integration of OpenMath and linked data. An ontology describing performance metrics in RDF is presented, together with an automated metric evaluation solution using multi-silo queries and computer algebra systems, providing a flexible, automated and extensible mechanism for the assessment of building performance. Building managers and engineers can simultaneously analyse time-series building performance at a range of levels, without burdensome manual intervention such as is the case with traditional solutions. A test implementation on a large university building highlights the potential of this solution.

HiGHmed - An Open Platform Approach to Enhance Care and Research across Institutional Boundaries.

Summary Introduction: This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on the German Medical Informatics Initiative. HiGHmed brings together 24 partners from academia and industry, aiming at improvements in care provision, biomedical research and epidemiology. By establishing a shared information governance framework, data integration centers and an open platform architecture in cooperation with independent healthcare providers, the meaningful reuse of data will be facilitated. Complementary, HiGHmed integrates a total of seven Medical Informatics curricula to develop collaborative structures and processes to train medical informatics professionals, physicians and researchers in new forms of data analytics. Governance and Policies: We describe governance structures and policies that have proven effective during the conceptual phase. These were further adapted to take into account the specific needs of the development and networking phase, such as roll-out, carerelated aspects and our focus on curricula development in Medical Inform atics. Architectural Framework and Methodology: To address the challenges of organizational, technical and semantic interoperability, a concept for a scalable platform architecture, the HiGHmed Platform, was developed. We outline the basic principles and design goals of the open platform approach as well as the roles of standards and specifications such as IHE XDS, openEHR, SNOMED CT and HL7 FHIR. A shared governance framework provides the semantic artifacts which are needed to establish semantic interoperability. Use Cases: Three use cases in the fields of oncology, cardiology and infection control will demonstrate the capabilities of the HiGHmed approach. Each of the use cases entails diverse challenges in terms of data protection, privacy and security, including clinical use of genome sequencing data (oncology), continuous longitudinal monitoring of physical activity (cardiology) and cross-site analysis of patient movement data (infection control). Discussion: Besides the need for a shared governance framework and a technical infrastructure, backing from clinical leaders is a crucial factor. Moreover, firm and sustainable commitment by participating organizations to collaborate in further development of their information system architectures is needed. Other challenges including topics such as data quality, privacy regulations, and patient consent will be addressed throughout the project.

New Metrics and Models for a Post-ISA Era

Pushed by both application and technology trends, today's computer systems employ unprecedented levels of heterogeneity, parallelism, and complexity as they seek to extend performance scaling and support new application domains. From datacenters to Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, these scaling gains come at the expense of degraded hardware-software abstraction layers, increased complexity at the hardware-software interface, and increased challenges for software reliability, interoperability, and performance portability This talk will explore how new metrics, models, and analysis techniques can be effective in this "Post-ISA" era of shifting abstractions. The talk will cover hardware and software design opportunities, methods for formal verification, and a look into the implications on technologies like IoT.

Extended Semantic Annotations for Generating Translators in the Arrowhead Framework

In order to create distributed automation systems, it is required to ensure their interoperability; however, ensuring interoperability between heterogeneous systems (using different communication protocols, data formats, and semantics) is a challenging task. Among many interoperability challenges, this paper addresses issues concerning semantic and data interoperability, namely, it provides a contribution to support the semantic compatibility verification and the generation of translators for XML messages. Translators are generated based on XML-schemas that are annotated with a reference ontology. We base our annotations on an extension of an existing declarative annotation method. In particular, our extension explicitly addresses ambiguities of annotations, schema instance mismatches, and coverage mismatches that frequently occur on Internet-of-things message schemas. We have evaluated our approach based on a set of interaction scenarios from the domain of the Arrowhead Project. A tool prototype that supports the semantic compatibility verification and the generation of XML translators is available at http://gres.uninova.pt/tag/ .

Georeferenced Agricultural Data for Statistical Reuse

The guidelines to the Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive states: “opening up public sector information (PSI) for reuse brings major socioeconomic benefits”, which has been recognised in various domains. However, the reuse may be limited due to organisational and technical reasons. This study addresses the collaboration between the statistical and the agricultural domain using the example of the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) and the Integrated Farm Statistics (IFS). After the comparison of the spatial data requirements in IACS and IFS, a conceptual collaboration model was developed that makes clear how the challenges of interoperability can be resolved by technical arrangements and work organisation.