Interoperability Of Information Systems Research Articles

Formal specification of image schemata -- a steptowards interoperability in geographic informationsystems

The formal specification of spatial objects and spatial relations is at the core of geographic data exchange and interoperability for geographic information systems (GIS). It is necessary that the representation of such objects and relations comes close to how people use them in their everyday lives, i.e., that these specifications are built upon elements of human spatial cognition. Image schemata have been suggested as highly abstract and structured mental patterns to capture spatial and similar physical as well as metaphorical relations between objects in the experiential world. We assume that image-schematic details for large-scale (geographic) space are potentially different from image-schematic details for small-scale (table-top) space. This paper reviews methods for the formal description of spatial relations, integrates them in a categorical view, and applies the methods arrived at to formally specify image schemata for large-scale (LOCATION, PATH, REGION, and BOUNDARY) as well as small-scale (CONTAINER, SURFACE, and LINK) space. These specifications should provide a foundation for further research on formalizing elements of human spatial cognition for interoperability in GIS.

Overcoming the semantic and other barriers to GIS interoperability

An increasing number of applications need to work on data that are scattered over several independent geographical information systems. This has led to extensive research efforts in the field of interoperable information systems. The term interoperability is used in a number of different contexts. In this paper a concise explanation of the meaning of interoperability in the context of GIS is given. Current efforts in this realm are presented. Problems and challenges of the next interoperable GIS generation are identified. A proposal to meet these challenges is presented.

Enhancing security and improving interoperability in healthcare information systems.

Security is a key issue in healthcare information systems, since most aspects of security become of considerable or even critical importance when handling healthcare information. In addition, the intense need for information exchange has revealed interoperability of systems and applications as another key issue. Standardization can play an important role towards both these issues. In this paper, relevant standardization activities are briefly presented, and existing and emerging healthcare information security standards are identified and critically analysed. The analysis is based on a framework which has been developed for this reason. Therefore, the identification of gaps and inconsistencies in current standardization, the description of the conflicts of standards with legislation, and the analysis of implications of these standards to user organizations, are the main results of this paper.

FORMAL METHODS IN CIS: HETEROGENEOUS DATABASES GUEST EDITORS' INTRODUCTION

There has been much progress recently in cooperative information systems: new problems are being attacked, new techniques are being developed. As the field matures and as its applications become deployed in a wider range of domains and locales, there is increasing interest in formal methods to understand, analyze, design, verify, and validate cooperative information systems. Since the science of cooperative information systems (CIS) unabashedly borrows from several traditional disciplines, the techniques and formal methods that it applies are also of a wide variety. This issue presents some of the best papers in this subfield of CIS. These papers are unified by their relationship to heterogeneous databases and information environments. Even within this subset of CIS, it is interesting to see methods whose traditional counterparts are in artificial intelligence, software engineering, and database semantics and query processing. Lee, Madnick, and Siegel address one of the fundamental problems in CIS, namely, that of the semantic interoperability of information systems that arise in different contexts. Context is the holy grail of a number of sciences that deal with meaning. This paper proposes an approach that has many useful properties for enabling the exchange of information among diverse data sources. It models context and interoperation at the knowledge level, term coined by Allen Newell in artificial intelligence; it uses techniques pioneered by Ray Reiter, also in artificial intelligence. This enables an abstract characterization of the meaning of information independent of its specific realization in a particular system. Lee and Wu also concern themselves with the interoperability of autonomous databases. They propose hyperrelations—extended from the relations of traditional database theory—as a uniform and succinct means to represent the local schemas

The coordination language facility: coordination of distributed objects

The development of communication Infrastructures and the rapid growth of networking facilities in information technologies increase information mobility and the decentralization of work processes in industry and services. This evolution leads to increasing demands on the coordination of information systems. However, information technologies available today are capable of supporting only interoperability of information systems from the point of view of communication infrastructures. This makes possible an easy exchange of information but provides no support for coordination. To fill this gap, we propose the Coordination Language Facility (CLF) as a coordination layer on top of distributed systems infrastructures such as CORBA-compilant Object Request Brokers. The CLF provides support for the coordination of heterogeneous, possibly distributed, active objects within larger units implementing (work) processes. On one hand, coordinator objects are declaratively implemented as rules. On the other hand, the objects participating in a coordination (participants) must instantiate a minimal interface which specifies the negotiation dialogue invoked, at run-time, by coordinators. The coordination activity is split between the implementation of the interface on the participants' side and the execution of the rules on the coordinators' side, thus offering a clear separation of concerns between local and global activities. The interface is specified using the CORBA standard for distributed objects, removing issues of heterogeneity and allowing each component to be implemented in the most appropriate language and environment. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Interoperability in information systems

Abstract. Two operationally autonomous information systems intemperate it system can make use of information contained in the other, or if they exchange transactions. A widely held assumption in this field is that the development interoperability among information systems should preserve the design autumn of the individual information systems in a strong sense. This paper demonstrate that preservation of strong design autonomy is not always possible owing to necessity to resolve semantic hereogeneity among the systems. This neces violation of autonomy calls into question the utility of research on general a tectures and the possibility of general solutions. We suggest some theme certain special cases where we believe feasible and useful computer scie research can be done in this area, and also suggest some implications for standard models of architectures for federated databases.

The Jupiter system: an environment for multidatabase interoperability

The goal of the Jupiter system is to provide interoperability services to a federation of autonomous and possibly heterogeneous database systems. Interoperability is the ability to connect software systems in a manner which facilitates transparent access to enterprise data resources, which may be distributed among legacy applications across multiple heterogeneous software and hardware platforms. The participants are free to withdraw at any time, with the result that global integration of the participant schemas is not seen as a feasible solution. Our solution is to provide a multidatabase layer and a suitable interoperator language to allow information providers to construct loosely-coupled interoperable autonomous information systems. The enor mous problems faced by information system providers are compounded by the difficulty of integrating key applications which have been developed using traditional methods with applications developed using, for example, object- oriented technology. A goal of our research is to address the area of multidatabase interoperability and, to this end, we have constructed the Jupiter prototype.

Enhancing inter-operability and data sharing in medical information systems

Clinical care generates an immense amount of patient data that has been archived and manipulated by computer-based information systems. Such computer-based medical record systems improved the accessibility of clinical information and made several studies of such information possible. Unfortunately, the care provider's task of retrieving, integrating, and interpreting only those portions of the patient's record that are relevant to a specific clinical problem is actually becoming increasingly difficult. This difficulty can be attributed primarily to the large variety of minimum data sets, the heterogeneous formats used to store the data, the heterogeneous data access methods and procedures, the varying granularity of access to data, the different rigid views of the data, and the lack of inter-operability among the information repositories of such data sets. Recognizing the aforementioned issues, we are engaged in a project to build a multi-database environment tailored for the interoperability of medical information systems. The main building blocks of such a system are a multi-disciplinary minimum data set and a catalogue for the support of interoperability and customization functions. In this paper, we report on the design approach used and describe the general architecture of the system.