A Service-Oriented Architecture for a Collaborative Orthopaedic Research Environment.

The role of collaboration in scientific and scholarly research is changing due to advances in Web technology. In particular, the need for collaborative science has generated demands for working environments that facilitate human communication and resource sharing among research communities. Such environments have been typically implemented as monolithic systems in the past, which are then faced with challenges in adapting to changing user requirements and changing technology. The Collaborative Orthopaedic Research Environment (CORE) project provides an infrastructure that combines clinical, educational and research activities in a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for orthopaedic researchers to collaborate in the design, analysis, and dissemination of experiments. An overview of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts is presented in this report before moving on to discuss the benefits and rationale of using a SOA in the context of the CORE project. A user requirements study conducted to guide the authors in designing the CORE VRE is also reported in this paper. Finally the SOA-based CORE architecture is described in the paper, followed by conclusions and future work for the CORE project