Artifact lifecycle management defines profiles to manage the lifecycle, governance, provenance, versioning, and representation of artifacts, as well as the relationships between artifacts.
Artifact lifecycle management profiles define the ability to:
- Manage lifecycle, governance and versioning of the models, content and forms
- Establish relationships and dependencies between models, content and forms
- Determine provenance, jurisdiction, authority and intellectual property
- Create representation and views of the information, realized through the appropriate transforms
- Provide access control and other security constraints
- Create annotations for better discovery and searching of artifacts
- Develop usage scenarios and context for the information
- Provide terminology and value set binding
The Semantic Infrastructure is a Service-Oriented Architecture, a system of services. Each service is defined with a service description (which is an artifact) that defines or references all the information needed to use, deploy, manage and otherwise control the service. In short, the service description artifact is an interlinked set of artifacts, which ultimately encompasses all artifacts of interest in the Semantic Infrastructure.
A service description, and consequently the artifacts it includes, has a number of architectural implications for artifacts managed by the Semantic Infrastructure. The implications related to artifact administration may be summarized as:
- Governance. Governance is expressed through policies and assumes multiple use of focused policy modules that can be employed across many common circumstances. Governance requires that the participants understand the intent of governance, the structures created to define and implement governance, and the processes to be followed to make governance operational. Governance policies are made operational through rules and regulations. Governance implies management to define and enforce rules and regulations. Governance relies on metrics to define and measure compliance.
- Policy. Descriptions to enable the policy modules to be visible, where the description includes a unique identifier for the policy and a sufficient representation of the meaning of terms used to describe the policy, its functions, and its effects; one or more discovery mechanisms that enable searching for policies that best meet the search criteria specified by the service participant, where the discovery mechanism will have access to the individual policy descriptions, possibly through some repository mechanism; accessible storage of policies and policy descriptions, so service participants can access, examine, and use the policies as defined.
- Artifact Descriptions to enable the artifact to be visible, where the description includes a unique identifier for the artifact and a sufficient representation of the meaning of terms used to describe the artifact, its functions, and its effects; one or more discovery mechanisms that enable searching for artifacts that best meet the search criteria specified by the service participant, where the discovery mechanism will have access to the individual artifact descriptions, possibly through some repository mechanism; accessible storage of artifacts and artifact descriptions, so service participants can access, examine, and use the artifacts as defined.
- Awareness Including capabilities for artifact description creation, publication, discovery, notification, and classification
- Change Including mechanisms for versioning, configuration management, and version conversion
The artifacts are bound to the services via the service metadata. The service metadata combined with the artifacts and supporting metadata provide a comprehensive service specification.
The artifact management requirements listed above are derived from the following use cases:
- caBIG® Clinical Information Suite: This project has adopted Enterprise Conformance and Compliance Framework (ECCF) for specifications and Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) documents for interoperability. The project requirements include the need for an infrastructure for managing all the artifacts generated during specification process, including HL7 models and documents.The project also intends to publish these artifacts for the community and vendors. The infrastructure needs to support better discovery, making all the relevant information available in the right context.
- Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) and other external electronic health record (EHR) adopters: ONC has adopted Continuity of Care Document (CCD) and Continuity of Care Record (CCR) for meaningful use. All national EHR implementations are expected to support forms and the semantics of these forms play a critical role in interoperability. The semantic infrastructure must provide a mechanism to create, store and manage these forms.
- Clinical Trials: Clinical trials use forms to capture clinical information, and the semantics captured by these forms are critical for interoperability and reporting. The semantic infrastructure must provide a mechanism to manage the lifecycle of these forms.
Functional Profile
- 1.1.1 - Governance Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. Consequently, it is important that organizations that plan to engage in service interactions adopt governance policies and procedures sufficient to ensure that there is standardization across both internal and external organizational boundaries to promote the effective creation and use of SOA-based services.
- 1.1.2 - Load Load any new artifact, through multiple interfaces
- 1.1.3 - Manage Determine provenance, jurisdiction, authority and intellectual property.
- 1.1.4 - Register Mediated awareness promotes loose coupling by keeping the consumers and services from explicitly referring to each other and the descriptions. Mediation lets interaction vary independently. Rather than all potential service consumers being informed on a continual basis about all services, there is a known or agreed upon facility or location that houses the service description. A common mechanism for mediated awareness is a registry-repository.
- 1.1.5 - Version The Semantic Infrastructure keeps track of each version, any relevant provenance information (e.g., who made the change), and supports the concept of being able to revert to any prior state. This version control would include the authoring of any new metadata (making contexts more explicit) and the assertions of model alignments.
