A semantic web service-based P2P Infrastructure for the interoperability of medical information systems (ARTEMIS)

The objective of the ARTEMIS project is to develop a semantic Web services based interoperability framework for the health care domain. We take a highly innovative approach regarding the interoperability of medical information systems with respect to the current approaches. We focus on processes in terms of Web services rather than recording and documentation of electronic health records. In other words, our approach allows a standard way of accessing the data since there are very many standards that need to work together. The interoperability problems of medical information systems are two fold: First there are multiple, incompatible, proprietary approaches to connecting disparate applications. Secondly, there are more than one standard to represent the same information, which in turn creates an interoperability problem. ARTEMIS will enable medical practitioners to access patient records securely, seamlessly through a low-cost peer-to-peer infrastructure, regardless of where their patients or their records might be. ARTEMIS project provides the healthcare industry with an ideal platform to achieve difficult integration problems. Our Web service model encapsulates already existing applications and access to documents in a standard way and incorporates service providers, service consumers and service registries. Currently most prominent Web service registries are Universal Description, Discovery, Integration (UDDI) and electronic business XML (ebXML). There are also very recent efforts to use Peer-to-peer networks based on Web services. However both service registries and P2P architectures available do not provide semantically enriched search capabilities. In the ARTEMIS project we will provide extensions to these architectures to enable discovery of the Web services based on their semantic descriptions. Medicine is one of the few domains to have some domain knowledge in a computable form which we will exploit in defining the semantics of medical Web services.STREP - Specific Targeted Research Projec