Semantic Service-oriented Design and Development Methodology for Enterprise Healthcare Integration

The application of ontologies (semantic) to enhance any existing or proposed Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based software architecture has various levels of use in terms of intra and inter enterprise integration. The use of ontologies in an architectural design and development methodology of any service-oriented enterprise software holds the key to offer a dynamic, flexible and scalable solution. Current efforts in semantic Service-Oriented Architecture (sSOA) involve primarily the top-down modeling of services and data. A roadmap that meets industrial demand of existing (bottom-up) services and data is missing. This paper analyses a healthcare standard (HL7) as an integration mechanism to connect healthcare enterprises. We have applied semantics on top of HL7 profiles to fill the gap between HL7 and SOA artifacts. The results have shown that semantics can ease the integration steps and burden to connect healthcare enterprises. We have proposed an integration platform which is based on a semantic Service-oriented Architecture (sSOA). Our goal is to apply lightweight semantics that incorporate and benefit from both development methodologies (top-down and bottom-up), to create a converged approach, for enterprise healthcare integration.