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Summary
Description of the profile

Information and behavioral models, in conjunction with discovery mechanisms, mediation, classification, traceability from requirement to operation, and interaction logs, enable comprehensive analysis to be performed through-out the life-cycle of artifacts , from design through run-time implementation.

The architectural implications of analysis include the following capabilities:

  • Service Interaction Model; which encompasses well-defined information and behavior models, service composition mechanisms, service interaction mechanisms, message exchange
  • Goal Mediation; which helps resolve incongruities related to data heterogeneity

Data semantics are captured in the Semantic Infrastructure and the platform will leverage the Semantic Infrastructure interfaces for analysis.

Analysis specializes capabilities architecturally implied by its associated concepts of Artifact , Behavior Model , Change , Composition , DataMediation , GoalMediation , Information Model , Interaction , Mediation , Message Exchange , Semantic Model , Service Composition , Service Interaction Model . The implied architectural capabilities are described in the following paragraphs.

Artifact An artifact is a managed resource within the Semantic Infrastructure.

An artifact is associated with the following capabilities:

  • descriptions to enable the artifact to be visible, where the description includes a unique identifier for the artifact and a sufficient, and preferably a machine processible, 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.

Behavior Model A well-defined service Behavior Model.

The capabilities of the Behavior Model include:

  • characterizes the knowledge of the actions invokes against the service and events that report real world effects as a result of those actions;
  • characterizes the temporal relationships and temporal properties of actions and events associated in a service interaction;
  • describe activities involved in a workflow activity that represents a unit of work;
  • describes the role(s) that a role player performs in a service-oriented business process or service-oriented business collaboration;
  • is both human readable and machine processable;
  • is referenceable from the Service Description artifact.

Change Artifact descriptions change over time and their contents will reflect changing needs and context.

Architectural implications of change on the Semantic Infrastructure are reflected in the following capabilities:

  • mechanisms to support the storage, referencing, and access to normative definitions of one or more versioning schemes that may be applied to identify different aggregations of descriptive information, where the different schemes may be versions of a versioning scheme itself;
  • configuration management mechanisms to capture the contents of the each aggregation and apply a unique identifier in a manner consistent with an identified versioning scheme;
  • one or more mechanisms to support the storage, referencing, and access to conversion relationships between versioning schemes, and the mechanisms to carry out such conversions.

Composition Artifact Descriptions may capture very focused information subsets or can be an aggregate of numerous component descriptions. Service description is an example of a likely aggregate for which manual maintenance of all aspects would not be feasible.

Architectural implications of composition on the Semantic Infrastructure are reflected in the following capabilities:

  • tools to facilitate identifying description elements that are to be aggregated to assemble the composite description;
  • tools to facilitate identifying the sources of information to associate with the description elements;
  • tools to collect the identified description elements and their associated sources into a standard, referenceable format that can support general access and understanding;
  • tools to automatically update the composite description as the component sources change, and to consistently apply versioning schemes to identify the new description contents and the type and significance of change that occurred.

DataMediation The most common type of mismatch in the SemanticWeb occurs due to usage of different terminologies by entities that shall interchange information. Within ontology-based environments like the Semantic Web, this results from usage of heterogeneous ontologies as the terminological basis for resource or information descriptions. A main merit of ontologies is that such mismatches can be handled on a semantic level by so-called ontology integration technique. Regarding representation formats and transfer protocols, a suitable way of resolving such heterogeneities is to lift the data from the syntactic to a semantic level on basis of ontologies, and then resolve the mismatches on this level.

The Data Mediator is invoked in two situations: during the discovery phase and during the communication phase. The need for data mediation is necessary when the ontologies of the goal and of the candidate or selected web service are different - in both the discovery or the communication phase. For data level heterogeneity handling, it uses ontology mapping techniques to resolve the mismatches that can appear between two given ontologies. The mappings between ontologies are created in a semi-automatic manner during design time and stored in a persistent storage. That is, these mappings are retrieved during run-time and applied on the incoming data (i.e. ontology instances) to transform it from the terms of one ontology in the terms of another ontology (this process in known as instance transformation). The same mappings can also be used for determining which concepts from the mapped ontologies are semantically related (and how). The former functionality is required to enable the process level mediation (it solves the data heterogeneity for the communication stage), while the latter is required to enable the functional level mediation (solves the data heterogeneity that appears in the functional descriptions).

GoalMediation Goal Mediators connect goals, i.e. both the source and target are goals. The mediation techniques used are (1) use of Data Mediators, and (2) functional level mediation on basis of logical relationship between source and target goals in order to increase the efficiency of functional discovery.

Information Model A well-defined service Information Model.

The capabilities of the Information Model include:

  • describes the syntax and semantics of the messages used to denote actions and events;
  • describes the syntax and semantics of the data payload(s) contained within messages;
  • documents exception conditions in the event of faults due to network outages, improper message/data formats, etc.;
  • is both human readable and machine processable
  • is referenceable from the Service Description artifact.

Interaction Descriptions of interactions are important for enabling auditability and repeatability, thereby establishing a context for results and support for understanding observed change in performance or results. Infrastructure services provide mechanisms to support service interaction.

Architectural implications of interactions on the Semantic Infrastructure are reflected in the following capabilities:

  • one or more mechanisms to capture, describe, store, discover, and retrieve interaction logs, execution contexts, and the combined interaction descriptions;
  • one or more mechanisms for attaching to any results the means to identify and retrieve the interaction description under which the results were generated.
  • mediation services such as message and event brokers, providers, and/or buses that provide message translation/transformation, gateway capability, message persistence, reliable message delivery, and/or intelligent routing semantics;
  • binding services that support translation and transformation of multiple application-level protocols to standard network transport protocols;
  • auditing and logging services that provide a data store and mechanism to record information related to service interaction activity such as message traffic patterns, security violations, and service contract and policy violations
  • security services that abstract techniques such as public key cryptography, secure networks, virus protection, etc., which provide protection against common security threats in a SOA ecosystem;
  • monitoring services such as hardware and software mechanisms that both monitor the performance of systems that host services and network traffic during service interaction, and are capable of generating regular monitoring reports.

Mediation Strategies and methodologies for mediation.

Mediation includes the following capabilities:

  • the creation of mappings,based on model artifacts.
  • the creation of appropriate mapping rules, based on model artifacts in conjunction with references to instances. Since the execution environment includes the Semantic Infrastructure, all mediated models conform to the SI meta-meta-model.
  • the execution of the mapping rules, which acts on the instance data taking as input source instances and having as output the target, mediated, instances

Message Exchange A layered and tiered service component architecture that supports multiple message exchange patterns (MEPs).

The capabilities of Message Exchange include:

  • promote the industry best practice of separation of concerns that facilitates flexibility in the presence of changing business requirements;
  • promote the industry best practice of separation of roles in a service development lifecycle such that subject matter experts and teams are structured along areas of expertise;
  • support numerous standard interaction patterns, peer-to-peer interaction patterns, enterprise integration patterns, and business-to-business integration patterns.

Semantic Model Artifact Descriptions make use of defined semantics, where the semantics may be used for categorization or providing other property and value information for description classes.

Architectural implications of semantics on the Semantic Infrastructure are reflected in the following capabilities:

  • semantic models that provide normative descriptions of the utilized terms, where the models may range from a simple dictionary of terms to an ontology showing complex relationships and capable of supporting enhanced reasoning. This is a refinement of the Artifact metadata capability.
  • mechanisms to support the storage, referencing, and access to these semantic models. This is a refinement of the Artifact store capability.
  • configuration management mechanisms to capture the normative description of each semantic model and to apply a unique identifier in a manner consistent with an identified versioning scheme. This is a refinement of the Change configurationManagement capability.
  • one or more mechanisms to support the storage, referencing, and access to conversion relationships between semantic models, and the mechanisms to carry out such conversions.

Service Composition Service composition mechanisms to support orchestration of service-oriented business processes and choreography of service-oriented business collaborations.

The capabilities of Service Composition include:

  • Declarative and programmatic compositional languages
  • Orchestration and/or choreography engines that support multi-step processes as part of a short-lived or long-lived business transaction;
  • Orchestration and/or choreography engines that support compensating transactions in the presences of exception and fault conditions.

Service Interaction Model Interaction is the activity involved in using a service to access capability in order to achieve a particular desired real world effect, where real world effect is the actual result of using a service. An interaction can be characterized by a sequence of actions. Consequently, interacting with a service, i.e. performing actions against the service--usually mediated by a series of message exchanges--involves actions performed by the service. Different modes of interaction are possible such as modifying the shared state of a resource. Note that a participant (or agent acting on behalf of the participant) can be the sender of a message, the receiver of a message, or both.

Interacting with Services has the following architectural implications on mechanisms that facilitate service interaction:

A well-defined service Information Model, as elaborated in the inherited Information Model profile.

A well-defined service Behavior Model, as elaborated in the inherited Behavior Model profile.

Service composition mechanisms to support orchestration of service-oriented business processes and choreography of service-oriented business collaborations, as elaborated in the inherited Service Composition profile.

Infrastructure services that provides mechanisms to support service interaction, as elaborated in the inherited Interaction profile.

A layered and tiered service component architecture that supports multiple message exchange patterns (MEPs)l, as elaborated in the inherited Message Exchange profile.

Capabilities
Requirements traceability

Requirement

Source

Capability

Artifact lifecycle management and metadata requirements include 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 represention 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 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: * caEHR: The caEHR project has adopted ECCF for specifications and CDA documents for interoperability. The caEHR project requirements include the need for an infrastructure for managing all the artifacts generated during specification process, including HL7 models and documents. The caEHR 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. * ONC and other external EHR adopters: ONC has adopted CCD and 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.

Semantic Infrastructure Requirements::Artifact Management::Artifact Lifecycle Management

harmonize
harmonizeAuthoritativeStandards

Users of caDSR will often ask "How does data element XYZ, or model ABC, harmonize with BRIDG?"  caDSR and CDISC have different senses of harmonization.  In caDSR there is an agreed-upon set of common data elements.  Harmonization involves mapping these CDEs and associations to BRIDG concepts.   If this mapping cannot be achieved then new CDEs would be created.  CDISC harmonization efforts are starting with N local concepts and from these trying to define a set of common data elements.  These common data elements would then be harmonized with the BRIDG standard.  There is some concern that BRIDG concepts are too high level and may not easily map to common data element definitions.  The CDISC SHARE project is attempting to map CDISC standards (e.g., SDTM & CDASH) to BRIDG concepts and then have these concepts reused by CDISC participants (e.g., CDOs, Pharmas), who create their own local concepts.  The expectation is that 20%-30% of the local concepts are "new science," and will not map to the current version of CDISC standards.  One of the caDSR deficiencies is that the same data element and its values can have different meanings depending on the context.   For example a Likert scale can represent quality of life or a pain assessment depending on the context.  These kinds of ambiguity should be resolved, perhaps through additional meta-data. Additional harmonization requirements are: * UML Descriptions:  Descriptions should be specific, consistent with the context of the model, and not circular. * UML-CDE Synonymy:  The concepts assigned to the CDE should fully capture the semantics of the (local) UML definition and reflect the same level of specificity (not more or less general). * CDE Concepts:  The set of concepts assigned to the CDE should have only a single interpretation. *Source:  * * Interview 5/24/2010, Dianne Reeves

Gap Analysis::caDSR::caDSR-6 - Harmonize CDEs with BRIDG

harmonizeCdeWithBridg

caDSR does not currently incorporate entire external standards.   However caDSR does extensively incorporate and harmonize bits and pieces of external standards.  The Knowledge Repository should have the ability to input, present, normalize and harmonize all or parts of external standards.  These external standards should include: * Map to HL73 RIM with precise semantic meanings defined * Map to BRIDG Terminology Information * Map to  Data Type standards (e.g., ISO 21090) * Map to CDISC Standards (mainly STDM and CDASH) * Map to 11179 Metadata Repository Standard and identify concepts * Map to existing caDSR CDEs defined and agreed upon by the governance process and local information models * Map to domain analysis models from a top down approach so that traceability is insured using the ECCF specification stack caDSR data elements are constructed now, using a middle-in approach at the class level. Context for V3 DAM models requires a top down approach so that traceability is maintained down to the PSM level.   In principle caDSR wants to be able to integrate other external standards (e.g., CDISC) as needed and map existing caDSR CDEs and associations to them.  This includes incorporating external standard model elements as new CDEs and associations.  Examples of this external standards integration include the fact that parts of the NCI Thesaurus reflect the standards used by CDISC.   There have been in bi-weekly terminology harmonization meetings with NCI, FDA and HL7 for over four years to agree on candidate terminologies. *Source:  * * 05/21/2010 and 05/24/2010 Interviews, Dianne Reeves

Gap Analysis::caDSR::caDSR-8 -  Support the harmonization of external data standards, data types, and terminology information

harmonize

CDISC does not currently incorporate entire external standards.  However, CDISC does extensively incorporate and harmonize bits and pieces of external standards.  The Knowledge Repository should have the ability to input, present, normalize and harmonize all or parts of external standards. Integrate current CDISC standards and extend them with efficacy-related domains & content as well as other needed external standards in an electronic, accessible format.   Examples of this partial normalization include the fact that parts of the NCI Thesaurus were reviewed and subsections harmonized; CDISC has been in bi-weekly terminology harmonization meetings with NCI, FDA and HL7 for over four years.   Wherever possible, existing controlled terminology will be used. Content will be provided from the external source and not duplicated in the repository (e.g., WHOdrug, MedDRA, FDA terminology, ICH, etc.).  UCOM (Unified Code for Units of Measure) and UCOM expressions as well as other units of measure have been reused.1  There was also a lot of reuse of selected metadata from NCI's caDSR project.  In terms of incorporating entire complex external standards their has been some work on reusing the drug discover process standards from the , the ISO 21090 Harmonized Data Types for Information Exchange, and the BRIDG standards. *Source:  * * CDISC Share Pilot Report and CDISC Requirements Package 1 - NCI Semantic Infrastructure, 5/28/2010, Section 2.4 * CDISC SHARE:  Pathway into the Future for Standards Development and Delivery, April 10, 2010, Brow W. Kisler, CDISC Senior Director * 05/20/2010 Interview, Dianne Reeves &  David Iberson-Hurst

Gap Analysis::CDISC::CDISC-3 -  Support the integration and harmonization of authoritative external data standards

harmonizeAuthoritativeStandards

A major CDISC requirement is to reuse and develop tooling that allows them to create high-quality standards faster.  These can be via NCI tools or some other external tools. It would similarly be useful to be able to add extra functionality to any collaborative/MDA environments.  CDISC is reviewing NCI, HL7, and BRIDG for candidate tools.  The intent is to use this tooling to define active touch-points among standards and eventually data sets.  The tooling touch-points can do some of the work of standards in achieving computer semantic interoperability (CSI).  This flexibility of adding additional functionality is analogous to FireFox browser plug-ins.  This flexibility is needed to support a diverse standards community needs and changing metadata authoring, harmonization and curation. A prototyping tools strategy that masks the complexity of the harmonization and standards development process is desired.   In addition, the CDISC SHARE (Shared Health and Research Electronic Library) may be based on the NCI Knowledge Repository code-base.   The proposed prototype tools should be reviewed by the two CDISC Teams (Team One-SDTM & CDASH, Team-Two-Metadata Structure for CDISC SHARE). *Source:  * * 5/20/2010 Interview, David Iberson-Hurst & David Hau

Gap Analysis::CDISC::CDISC-4 -  Develop tooling to shorten the time it takes to collaboratively define CDISC standards

collaborativeStandardDevelopment

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. SOA governance requires numerous architectural capabilities on the Semantic Infrastructure: Governance is expressed through policies and assumes multiple use of focused policy modules that can be employed across many common circumstances This is elaborated in the inherited Policy profile. 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. This is provided by capabilities specialized from the inherited Management Profile. Governance policies are made operational through rules and regulations. This is provided by the following capabilities, most of which are specializations of the inherited Artifact Profile: * descriptions to enable the rules and regulations to be visible, where the description includes a unique identifier and a sufficient, and preferably a machine process-able, representation of the meaning of terms used to describe the rules and regulations; * one or more discovery mechanisms that enable searching for rules and regulations that may apply to situations corresponding to the search criteria specified by the service participant; where the discovery mechanism will have access to the individual descriptions of rules and regulations, possibly through some repository mechanism; * accessible storage of rules and regulations and their respective descriptions, so service participants can understand and prepare for compliance, as defined. * SOA services to access automated implementations of the Governance Processes. Governance implies management to define and enforce rules and regulations.. This is elaborated in the inherited Management profile. Governance relies on metrics to define and measure compliance. This is elaborated in the inherited Metric profile.

Semantic Profile::OASIS SOA::Governance Model

discovery from inherited abstract profile Artifactidentity from inherited abstract profile Artifactmetadata from inherited abstract profile Artifactstore from inherited abstract profile Artifact

Interaction is the activity involved in using a service to access capability in order to achieve a particular desired real world effect, where real world effect is the actual result of using a service. An interaction can be characterized by a sequence of actions. Consequently, interacting with a service, i.e. performing actions against the service--usually mediated by a series of message exchanges--involves actions performed by the service. Different modes of interaction are possible such as modifying the shared state of a resource. Note that a participant (or agent acting on behalf of the participant) can be the sender of a message, the receiver of a message, or both. Interacting with Services has the following architectural implications on mechanisms that facilitate service interaction: A well-defined service Information Model, as elaborated in the inherited Information Model profile. A well-defined service Behavior Model, as elaborated in the inherited Behavior Model profile. Service composition mechanisms to support orchestration of service-oriented business processes and choreography of service-oriented business collaborations, as elaborated in the inherited Service Composition profile. Infrastructure services that provides mechanisms to support service interaction, as elaborated in the inherited Interaction profile. A layered and tiered service component architecture that supports multiple message exchange patterns (MEPs)l, as elaborated in the inherited Message Exchange profile.

Semantic Profile::OASIS SOA::Interacting with Services Model

message from inherited abstract profile Information Modelpayload from inherited abstract profile Information Modelexception from inherited abstract profile Information ModelserviceBinding from inherited abstract profile Information ModeldiagramModelBinding from inherited abstract profile Information ModeldiagramModelBinding from inherited abstract profile Behavior ModelserviceBinding from inherited abstract profile Behavior Modelaction from inherited abstract profile Behavior Modeltemporal from inherited abstract profile Behavior Modelworkflow from inherited abstract profile Behavior Modelparticipant from inherited abstract profile Behavior ModelcompositionalLanguage from inherited abstract profile Service CompositionbusinessTransaction from inherited abstract profile Service CompositioncompensatingTransaction from inherited abstract profile Service Compositionpattern from inherited abstract profile Message ExchangebusinessRequirement from inherited abstract profile Message ExchangeserviceDevelopment from inherited abstract profile Message ExchangeinteractionLog from inherited abstract profile InteractioninteractionResults from inherited abstract profile Interactionmediation from inherited abstract profile Interactionbinding from inherited abstract profile Interactionlogging from inherited abstract profile Interactionsecurity from inherited abstract profile Interactionmonitoring from inherited abstract profile Interaction

The Web Service Execution Environment (WSMX) is an environment that is designed to allow dynamic mediation, selection and invocation of web services. For the purposes of the Semantic Infrastructure roadmap, the WSMX specification has been abstracted to be applicable to any SOA environment, and to mediation of any artifact. A range of different models or ontologies describing the same or related problem domains could be created by different entities throughout the world. This implies that more and more systems and applications require mediation in order to be able to integrate and use heterogeneous data sources. Mapping between models is required in several classes of application, such as Information Integration and Semantic Web, Data Migration or Ontology Merging. Unfortunately, there is always a trade-off between how accurate these mappings are and the degree of automation that can be offered. There are approaches able to provide these kinds of mappings (also known as alignments) between different schemas or ontologies using machine learning techniques in an automatic manner but only with limited accuracy. In order to rule out the false results, the domain expert has to validate and check the mappings or the alignment at the end of the process. Another type of approach considers the human intervention from the beginning, proposing an interactive mapping process where the tool suggestions and the human user validations alternate in the process until the final result is achieved. The mediation solution presented in this roadmap follows the second approach described above: we propose well-defined strategies and methodologies for the mapping process in order to guarantee - the most correct and complete mappings possible, together with a set of algorithms and strategies meant to make the mapping task much easier (reducing it to simple validations and choices). We adopted this approach because we believe that in the context of SOA Services and business transactions the transformations on data must be 100% accurate. In addition, we consider that an interactive approach towards mapping creation is much more appropriate in the case of medium/large ontologies and also when the intention is to abstract the domain expert (using a graphical interface) from the underlying logical formalism used to represent the mappings. There are four types of heterogeneities that can occur within the SOA. Each heterogeneity type requires a specific technique for mismatch resolution, referred to as levels of mediation: * Terminology: Services or other resources use different terminologies; e.g. one entity understands name to be the full name of a person, and another one defines name to only denote the family name. This can hamper successful interoperation on the semantic level, i.e. concerning the meaning of information. * Representation Format and Transfer Protocol: resources that interact use different formats or languages for information representation (e.g. HTML, XML, RDF, OWL, etc.), or different protocols for information transfer (e.g. HTTP, RPC, etc.); incompatibilities on this level obviously can hamper prosperous information interchange. * Functionality: specific to services, this refers to functionalities of a provider and a requester that do not match exactly. This enforces complex and thus expensive reasoning procedures for detecting services usable for a given request; the need for such expensive operations can be reduced by gaining and utilizing knowledge on the functional heterogeneities * Business Process: also specific to services, this denotes mismatches in the supported interaction behavior of services and clients. This can hamper successful interaction on a behavioral level for consumption or interaction of services. The process of mediation generally consists of three main steps: * the creation of mappings,based on model artifacts. * the creation of appropriate mapping rules, based on model artifacts in conjunction with references to instances. Since the execution environment includes the Semantic Infrastructure, all mediated models conform to the SI meta-meta-model. * the execution of the mapping rules, which acts on the instance data taking as input source instances and having as output the target, mediated, instances Service message exchanges are represented in terms of the sender's models, and each of the business partners (e.g. enterprises) understands only messages expressed in terms of its own model. One of the roles of the execution environment (by mean of mediation), is to transform, if necessary, the received message from the terms of sender's model into the terms of the receiver's model, before sending it further. From the perspective of the models, each message contains instances of the source model that have to be transformed into instances of the target model. WSMX distinguishes four different types of mediators : * mediators that link two goals. This link represents the refinement of the source goal into the target goal * data mediators that import models and resolve possible representation mismatches between models. * mediators that link web service to goals, meaning that the web service (totally or partially) fulfils the goal to which it is linked. The mediators may explicitly state the difference between the two entities and map different vocabularies (through the use of data Mediators). * mediators linking two Web Services.

Semantic Profile::OASIS Semantic SOA::Mediation

mappingDefinition from inherited abstract profile MediationmappingRules from inherited abstract profile MediationmappingExecution from inherited abstract profile Mediation

A service description is an artifact, usually document-based, that defines or references the information needed to use, deploy, manage and otherwise control a service. This includes not only the information and behavior models associated with a service to define the service interface but also includes information needed to decide whether the service is appropriate for the current needs of the service consumer. Thus, the service description will also include information such as service reachability, service functionality, and the policies and contracts associated with a service. A service description artifact may be a single document or it may be an interlinked set of documents. Architectural implications of service description on the Semantic Infrastructure are reflected in the following functional decomposition: * Description will change over time and its contents will reflect changing needs and context. This is elaborated in the inherited Change profile. * Description makes use of defined semantics, where the semantics may be used for categorization or providing other property and value information for description classes. This is elaborated in the inherited Semantic Model profile. * Descriptions include reference to policies defining conditions of use and optionally contracts representing agreement on policies and other conditions. This is elaborated in the inherited Policy profile. * Descriptions include references to metrics which describe the operational characteristics of the subjects being described. This is elaborated in the inherited Metrics profile. * Descriptions of the interactions are important for enabling auditability and repeatability, thereby establishing a context for results and support for understanding observed change in performance or results. This is elaborated in the inherited Interaction profile. * Descriptions may capture very focused information subsets or can be an aggregate of numerous component descriptions. Service description is an example of a likely aggregate for which manual maintenance of all aspects would not be feasible. This is elaborated in the inherited Composition profile. * Descriptions provide up-to-date information on what a resource is, the conditions for interacting with the resource, and the results of such interactions. As such, the description is the source of vital information in establishing willingness to interact with a resource, reachability to make interaction possible, and compliance with relevant conditions of use. This is elaborated in the inherited Interoperability profile. Policy capabilities are specialization of Artifact capabilities.

Semantic Profile::OASIS SOA::Service Description Model

versioning from inherited abstract profile ChangeconfigurationManagement from inherited abstract profile Changetransition from inherited abstract profile Changediscovery from inherited abstract profile Artifactidentity from inherited abstract profile Artifactmetadata from inherited abstract profile Artifactstore from inherited abstract profile ArtifactsemanticConversion from inherited abstract profile Semantic ModelinteractionLog from inherited abstract profile InteractioninteractionResults from inherited abstract profile InteractioncompositionArchive from inherited abstract profile Compositionassembly from inherited abstract profile CompositioncompositionChange from inherited abstract profile CompositioncomponentAcquisition from inherited abstract profile Composition

One of the key requirements for participants interacting with each other in the context of a SOA is achieving visibility: before services can interoperate, the participants have to be visible to each other using whatever means are appropriate. The Reference Model analyzes visibility in terms of awareness, willingness, and reachability. Visibility in a SOA ecosystem has the following architectural implications on mechanisms providing support for awareness, willingness, and reachability: Mechanisms providing support for awareness will likely have the following minimum capabilities: * creation of Description, preferably conforming to a standard Description format and structure; * publishing of Description directly to a consumer or through a third party mediator; * discovery of Description, preferably conforming to a standard for Description discovery; * notification of Description updates or notification of the addition of new and relevant Descriptions; * classification of Description elements according to standardized classification schemes. In a SOA ecosystem with complex social structures, awareness may be provided for specific communities of interest. The architectural mechanisms for providing awareness to communities of interest will require support for: * policies that allow dynamic formation of communities of interest; * trust that awareness can be provided for and only for specific communities of interest, the bases of which is typically built on keying and encryption technology. The architectural mechanisms for determining willingness to interact will require support for: * verification of identity and credentials of the provider and/or consumer; * access to and understanding of description; * inspection of functionality and capabilities; * inspection of policies and/or contracts. The architectural mechanisms for establishing reachability will require support for: * the location or address of an endpoint; * verification and use of a service interface by means of a communication protocol; * determination of presence with an endpoint which may only be determined at the point interaction but may be further aided by the use of a presence protocol for which the endpoints actively participate.

Semantic Profile::OASIS SOA::Service Visibility Model

discovery from inherited abstract profile Artifact

action
Description

characterizes the knowledge of the actions invokes against the service and events that report real world effects as a result of those actions;

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
assembly
Description

Tools to facilitate identifying description elements that are to be aggregated to assemble the composite description.

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
binding
Description

binding services that support translation and transformation of multiple application-level protocols to standard network transport protocols;

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
businessRequirement
Description

promote the industry best practice of separation of concerns that facilitates flexibility in the presence of changing business requirements;

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
businessTransaction
Description

Orchestration and/or choreography engines that support multi-step processes as part of a short-lived or long-lived business transaction;

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
collaborativeStandardDevelopment
Description

A major CDISC requirement is to reuse and develop tooling that allows them to create high-quality standards faster.  These can be via NCI tools or some other external tools. It would similarly be useful to be able to add extra functionality to any collaborative/MDA environments.  CDISC is reviewing NCI, HL7, and BRIDG for candidate tools.  The intent is to use this tooling to define active touch-points among standards and eventually data sets.  The tooling touch-points can do some of the work of standards in achieving computer semantic interoperability (CSI).  This flexibility of adding additional functionality is analogous to FireFox browser plug-ins. 

This flexibility is needed to support a diverse standards community needs and changing metadata authoring, harmonization and curation. A prototyping tools strategy that masks the complexity of the harmonization and standards development process is desired.   In addition, the CDISC SHARE (Shared Health and Research Electronic Library) may be based on the NCI Knowledge Repository code-base.   The proposed prototype tools should be reviewed by the two CDISC Teams (Team One-SDTM & CDASH, Team-Two-Metadata Structure for CDISC SHARE).

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
compensatingTransaction
Description

Orchestration and/or choreography engines that support compensating transactions in the presences of exception and fault conditions.

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
componentAcquisition
Description

Tools to facilitate identifying the sources of information to associate with the description elements.

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
compositionalLanguage
Description

Declarative and programmatic compositional languages

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
compositionArchive
Description

Tools to collect the identified description elements and their associated sources into a standard, referenceable format that can support general access and understanding.

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
compositionChange
Description

Tools to automatically update the composite description as the component sources change, and to consistently apply versioning schemes to identify the new description contents and the type and significance of change that occurred.

Requirements addressed
Overview of possible operations
configurationManagement
Description

Mechanisms to support the storage, referencing, and access to normative definitions of one or more versioning schemes that may be applied to identify different aggregations of descriptive information, where the different schemes may be versions of a versioning scheme itself.

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diagramModelBinding
Description

Is both human readable and machine processable.

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discovery
Description

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.

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exception
Description

Documents exception conditions in the event of faults due to network outages, improper message/data formats, etc.

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harmonize
Description

Support the harmonization of external data standards, data types, and terminology information.

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harmonizeAuthoritativeStandards
Description

Support the integration and harmonization of authoritative external data standards.

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harmonizeCdeWithBridg
Description

Users of caDSR will often ask "How does data element XYZ, or model ABC, harmonize with BRIDG?" 

caDSR and CDISC have different senses of harmonization.  In caDSR there is an agreed-upon set of common data elements.  Harmonization involves mapping these CDEs and associations to BRIDG concepts.   If this mapping cannot be achieved then new CDEs would be created.  CDISC harmonization efforts are starting with N local concepts and from these trying to define a set of common data elements.  These common data elements would then be harmonized with the BRIDG standard. 

There is some concern that BRIDG concepts are too high level and may not easily map to common data element definitions.  The CDISC SHARE project is attempting to map CDISC standards (e.g., SDTM & CDASH) to BRIDG concepts and then have these concepts reused by CDISC participants (e.g., CDOs, Pharmas), who create their own local concepts.  The expectation is that 20%-30% of the local concepts are "new science," and will not map to the current version of CDISC standards.  One of the caDSR deficiencies is that the same data element and its values can have different meanings depending on the context.   For example a Likert scale can represent quality of life or a pain assessment depending on the context.  These kinds of ambiguity should be resolved, perhaps through additional meta-data.

Additional harmonization requirements are:

  • UML Descriptions:  Descriptions should be specific, consistent with the context of the model, and not circular.
  • UML-CDE Synonymy:  The concepts assigned to the CDE should fully capture the semantics of the (local) UML definition and reflect the same level of specificity (not more or less general).
  • CDE Concepts:  The set of concepts assigned to the CDE should have only a single interpretation.
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identity
Description

Descriptions which include a unique identifier for the artifact.

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interactionLog
Description

One or more mechanisms to capture, describe, store, discover, and retrieve interaction logs, execution contexts, and the combined interaction descriptions.

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interactionResults
Description

One or more mechanisms for attaching to any results the means to identify and retrieve the interaction description under which the results were generated.

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logging
Description

auditing and logging services that provide a data store and mechanism to record information related to service interaction activity such as message traffic patterns, security violations, and service contract and policy violations

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mappingDefinition
Description

The creation, destruction, editing, managing of mappings, based on model artifacts.

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mappingExecution
Description

The execution of the mapping rules, which acts on incoming source instances and provides mediated target instances.

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mappingRules
Description

The creation, destruction, editing, managing of appropriate mapping rules, based on model artifacts in conjunction with references to instances. Since the execution environment includes the Semantic Infrastructure, all mediated models conform to the SI meta-meta-model.

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mediation
Description

mediation services such as message and event brokers, providers, and/or buses that provide message translation/transformation, gateway capability, message persistence, reliable message delivery, and/or intelligent routing semantics;

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message
Description

Describes the syntax and semantics of the messages used to denote actions and events

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metadata
Description

A representation of the meaning of terms used to describe the artifact, its functions, and its effects.

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monitoring
Description

monitoring services such as hardware and software mechanisms that both monitor the performance of systems that host services and network traffic during service interaction, and are capable of generating regular monitoring reports.

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participant
Description

describes the role(s) that a role player performs in a service-oriented business process or service-oriented business collaboration;

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pattern
Description

support numerous standard interaction patterns, peer-to-peer interaction patterns, enterprise integration patterns, and business-to-business integration patterns.

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payload
Description

Describes the syntax and semantics of the data payload(s) contained within messages

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provenance
Description

While the Resource identity provides the means to know which subject and subject description are being considered, Provenance as related to the Description class provides information that reflects on the quality or usability of the subject. Provenance specifically identifies the entity (human, defined role, organization, ...) that assumes responsibility for the resource being described and tracks historic information that establishes a context for understanding what the resource provides and how it has changed over time. Responsibilities may be directly assumed by the Stakeholder who owns a Resource or the Owner may designate Responsible Parties for the various aspects of maintaining the resource and provisioning it for use by others. There may be more than one entity identified under Responsible Parties; for example, one entity may be responsible for code maintenance while another is responsible for provisioning of the executable code. The historical aspects may also have multiple entries, such as when and how data was collected and when and how it was subsequently processed, and as with other elements of description, may provide links to other assets maintained by the Resource owner.

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security
Description

security services that abstract techniques such as public key cryptography, secure networks, virus protection, etc., which provide protection against common security threats in a SOA ecosystem;

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semanticConversion
Description

One or more mechanisms to support the storage, referencing, and access to conversion relationships between semantic models, and the mechanisms to carry out such conversions.

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serviceBinding
Description

Is referenceable from the Service Description artifact.

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serviceDevelopment
Description

promote the industry best practice of separation of roles in a service development lifecycle such that subject matter experts and teams are structured along areas of expertise;

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store
Description

Accessible storage of artifacts and artifact descriptions, so service participants can access, examine, and use the artifacts as defined.

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temporal
Description

characterizes the temporal relationships and temporal properties of actions and events associated in a service interaction;

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transition
Description

One or more mechanisms to support the storage, referencing, and access to conversion relationships between versioning schemes, and the mechanisms to carry out such conversions.

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versioning
Description

Configuration management mechanisms to capture the contents of the each aggregation and apply a unique identifier in a manner consistent with an identified versioning scheme.

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workflow
Description

Describe activities involved in a workflow activity that represents a unit of work.

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