Interoperable Information Exchange Research Articles

Connecting Producers and Recyclers: A Digital Product Passport Concept and Implementation Suitable for End-of-Life Management

To facilitate the shift from a Linear to a Circular Economy, it is essential to alter the manner in which we manufacture, use, and dispose of products. Interoperable information exchange among various stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle is crucial if we wish to encourage reuse, repair, remanufacturing, refurbishing, or recycling. The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a concept for capturing product information. This paper presents an end-to-end process for sharing product-related information along the product lifecycle explicitly designed to cater to the needs of all stakeholders, including end-of-life actors. This process is based on a DPP concept and implementation called the Digital Lifecycle Passport and a multi-stakeholder platform. Technically, it relies on the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), which enables information to be shared in a structured way. We demonstrate how this process can improve waste sorting and how it can be used for life cycle assessment (LCA). LCA results are captured in an interoperable way based on DIN SPEC 91474, which will facilitate automatic documentation for regulatory purposes in the future. Our approach is a forerunner in the sense that it uses the DPP and the AAS for end-of-life management.

Interoperability among hospitals treating populations that have been marginalized.

To test whether differences in hospital interoperability are related to the extent to which hospitals treat groups that have been economically and socially marginalized. Data on 2393 non-federal acute care hospitals in the United States from the American Hospital Association Information Technology Supplement fielded in 2021, the 2019 Medicare Cost Report, and the 2019 Social Deprivation Index. Cross-sectional analysis. We identified five proxy measures related to marginalization and assessed the relationship between those measures and the likelihood that hospitals engaged in all four domains of interoperable information exchange and participated in national interoperability networks in cross-sectional analysis. In unadjusted analysis, hospitals that treated patients from zip codes with high social deprivation were 33% less likely to engage in interoperable exchange (Relative Risk = 0.67, 95% CI: 0.58-0.76) and 24% less likely to participate in a national network than all other hospitals (RR = 0.76; 95% CI: 0.66-0.87). Critical Access Hospitals (CAH) were 24 percent less likely to engage in interoperable exchange (RR = 0.76; 95% CI: 0.69-0.83) but not less likely to participate in a national network (RR = 0.97; 95% CI: 0.88-1.06). No difference was detected for 2 measures (high Disproportionate Share Hospital percentage and Medicaid case mix) while 1 was associated with a greater likelihood to engage (high uncompensated care burden). The association between social deprivation and interoperable exchange persisted in an analysis examining metropolitan and rural areas separately and in adjusted analyses accounting for hospital characteristics. Hospitals that treat patients from areas with high social deprivation were less likely to engage in interoperable exchange than other hospitals, but other measures were not associated with lower interoperability. The use of area deprivation data may be important to monitor and address hospital clinical data interoperability disparities to avoid related health care disparities.

Expressiveness of an International Semantic Standard for Wound Care: Mapping a Standardized Item Set for Leg Ulcers to the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms.

BackgroundChronic health conditions are on the rise and are putting high economic pressure on health systems, as they require well-coordinated prevention and treatment. Among chronic conditions, chronic wounds such as cardiovascular leg ulcers have a high prevalence. Their treatment is highly interdisciplinary and regularly spans multiple care settings and organizations; this places particularly high demands on interoperable information exchange that can be achieved using international semantic standards, such as Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine–Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT).ObjectiveThis study aims to investigate the expressiveness of SNOMED CT in the domain of wound care, and thereby its clinical usefulness and the potential need for extensions.MethodsA clinically consented and profession-independent wound care item set, the German National Consensus for the Documentation of Leg Wounds (NKDUC), was mapped onto the precoordinated concepts of the international reference terminology SNOMED CT. Before the mapping took place, the NKDUC was transformed into an information model that served to systematically identify relevant items. The mapping process was carried out in accordance with the ISO/TR 12300 formalism. As a result, the reliability, equivalence, and coverage rate were determined for all NKDUC items and sections.ResultsThe developed information model revealed 268 items to be mapped. Conducted by 3 health care professionals, the mapping resulted in moderate reliability (κ=0.512). Regarding the two best equivalence categories (symmetrical equivalence of meaning), the coverage rate of SNOMED CT was 67.2% (180/268) overall and 64.3% (108/168) specifically for wounds. The sections general medical condition (55/66, 83%), wound assessment (18/24, 75%), and wound status (37/57, 65%), showed higher coverage rates compared with the sections therapy (45/73, 62%), wound diagnostics (8/14, 57%), and patient demographics (17/34, 50%).ConclusionsThe results yielded acceptable reliability values for the mapping procedure. The overall coverage rate shows that two-thirds of the items could be mapped symmetrically, which is a substantial portion of the source item set. Some wound care sections, such as general medical conditions and wound assessment, were covered better than other sections (wound status, diagnostics, and therapy). These deficiencies can be mitigated either by postcoordination or by the inclusion of new concepts in SNOMED CT. This study contributes to pushing interoperability in the domain of wound care, thereby responding to the high demand for information exchange in this field. Overall, this study adds another puzzle piece to the general knowledge about SNOMED CT in terms of its clinical usefulness and its need for further extensions.

Automatic Information Exchange in the Early Rescue Chain Using the International Standard Accident Number (ISAN)

Thus far, emergency calls are answered by human operators who interview the calling person in order to obtain all relevant information. In the near future—based on the Internet of (Medical) Things (IoT, IoMT)—accidents, emergencies, or adverse health events will be reported automatically by smart homes, smart vehicles, or smart wearables, without any human in the loop. Several parties are involved in this communication: the alerting system, the rescue service (responding system), and the emergency department in the hospital (curing system). In many countries, these parties use isolated information and communication technology (ICT) systems. Previously, the International Standard Accident Number (ISAN) has been proposed to securely link the data in these systems. In this work, we propose an ISAN-based communication platform that allows semantically interoperable information exchange. Our aims are threefold: (i) to enable data exchange between the isolated systems, (ii) to avoid data misinterpretation, and (iii) to integrate additional data sources. The suggested platform is composed of an alerting, responding, and curing system manager, a workflow manager, and a communication manager. First, the ICT systems of all parties in the early rescue chain register with their according system manager, which tracks the keep-alive. In case of emergency, the alerting system sends an ISAN to the platform. The responsible rescue services and hospitals are determined and interconnected for platform-based communication. Next to the conceptual design of the platform, we evaluate a proof-of-concept implementation according to (1) the registration, (2) channel establishment, (3) data encryption, (4) event alert, and (5) information exchange. Our concept meets the requirements for scalability, error handling, and information security. In the future, it will be used to implement a virtual accident registry.

Open Information Architecture for Seamless Integration of Renewable Energy Sources

Electric power systems are currently confronted with a fundamental paradigm change related to its planning and operation, mainly caused by the massive integration of renewables. To allow higher penetration of them within existing grid infrastructures, the “smart grid” makes more efficient use of existing resources by integrating appropriate information technologies. Utilising the benefits of such smart grids, it is necessary to develop new automation architectures and control strategies, as well as corresponding information and communication solutions. This makes it possible to effectively use and manage a large amount of dispersed generators and to utilise their “smart” capabilities. The scalability and openness of automation systems currently used by energy utilities have to be improved significantly for handling a high amount of distributed generators. This will be needed to meet the challenges of missing common and open interfaces, as well as the large number of different protocols. In the work at hand, these shortcomings have been tackled by a conceptual solution for open and interoperable information exchange and engineering of automation applications. The approach is characterised by remote controllable services, a generic communication concept, and a formal application modelling method for distributed energy resource components. Additionally, the specification of an access management scheme for distributed energy resources, taking into account different user roles in the smart grid, allowed for a fine-grained distinction of access rights for use cases and actors. As a concrete result of this work, a generic and open communication underlay for smart grid components was developed, providing a flexible and adaptable infrastructure and supporting future smart grid requirements and roll-out. A proof-of-concept validation of the remote controllable service concept based on this infrastructure has been conducted in appropriate laboratory environments to confirm the main benefits of this approach.

PROMES: An ontology‐based messaging service for semantically interoperable information exchange during disaster response

AbstractDisaster response requires the cooperation of multiple emergency responder organizations (EROs). However, after‐action reports relating to large‐scale disasters identity communication difficulties among EROs as a major hindrance to collaboration. On the one hand, the use of two‐radio communication, based on multiple orthogonal frequencies and uneven coverage, has been shown to degrade inter‐organization communication. On the other hand, because they reflect different areas of expertise, EROs use differing terminologies, which are difficult to reconcile. These issues lead to ambiguities, misunderstandings, and inefficient exchange of data and information among those involved, which can impede the response process and slow decision making. We, therefore, hypothesize that promoting semantic interoperability across ERO information systems might improve information exchange among stakeholders and thereby allow a more coherent response to the disaster. We propose an ontology‐based messaging service on the basis of the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) standards. The parties involved will continue to use the terminologies to which they are accustomed, but the system will resolve inconsistencies and thereby enhance mutual understanding among EROs by ensuring semantic translation of the exchanged information. The evaluation of the semantic translation demonstrated the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed service.

Interoperability Services Supporting Information Exchange Between Cybersecurity Organisations

The security of cyberspace can be ensured by a broad cooperation of different organizations, actors. This cooperation cannot be achieved without interoperable information exchange between cybersecurity actors, organisations, and their IT systems. Interoperable information exchange can be realized using own resources, or using services provided by third parties. IT interoperability service can be defined as a service by which a service provider supports interoperable data exchange between IT systems of service consumers and cooperating actors. This publication provides different categorizations of interoperability services, discusses their benefits, and the necessary user tasks. It determines the types of interoperability service providers and their necessary capabilities. Finally, it defines the special requirements of cybersecurity information exchange and presents the main types of required services.

GIS Based Interoperable Platform for Disaster Data Exchange Using OGC Standards and Spatial Query

Accurate, speedy and interoperable information exchange among the stakeholders achieve effective rescue and relief operations in an emergency. The current research work aims at location-based real time or near real time disaster data gathering and accumulation. The dynamic disaster data is integrated with the static geospatial data to facilitate spatial analytics and disseminate the integrated data through OGC web services to various stakeholders for further processing by different expert domain applications. The research work also facilitates spatio-temporal querying system through Geo-query, and OLAP operations on integrated disaster data with geospatial visualization. The design and implementation of the work is achieved through a mobile application integrated with a GIS based web portal by a centralized remote server. The entire architecture has been tested by implementing in an emergency situation and facilitated by an effective interoperable information exchange and spatio-temporal queries.

Interoperable Information Exchange as Enabler of NFF Related TES

The lifecycle of a product is managed through the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) including the integration of Product Service Systems (PSS) as well as Through-life Engineering Services. Both activities are performed by staff throughout the entire lifecycle and require the input of knowledge of different product lifecycle phases. The authors demonstrate the necessity of information exchange between the beginning of life and the middle of life on the example of NFF. The provision of the right information in the middle of life should be an information based TES which can only be achieved if the interoperability challenges are solved between the life-cycle phases. This paper demonstrates how existing semantic data integration approaches could be applied to enable the required information exchange. For that purpose, the modelling of test process related knowledge as ontology and corresponding extraction methods are presented.