The purpose of the ODP Enterprise Language is to define scope, purpose and business context for a system to be designed, including the definition of business requirements for the system, key stakeholders and how these stakeholders interact with the system. The key modelling concept is that of community, which can be regarded as a collaborative arrangement of different stakeholders established to meet their mutual objectives. The community is defined through a contract that specifies:
- the objective of the community
- the roles involved, including behavior required for entities to take up the roles, thus realizing the behavior of the community; the entities taking roles can be people, organisations or systems
- the business services in the community, offered by certain roles (providers) to other roles (consumers)
- the interactions between roles in the community, including process as special kind of behavior
- the policies (legal, regulatory or organisational) that constrain the behavior of roles in the community
In many respects, the concept of community is similar to the concept of UML collaboration, but the community concept adds value by allowing for the definition of policies that have particular importance for e-health applications, e.g. consent, privacy, duty of care etc.
The concept of community can be represented through appropriate UML concepts as defined in the ISO standard UML profile for ODP [5]. Several UML-based tools provide plug-ins for this standard, most notably Sparx Enterprise Architect and MagicDraw.
Figure 4.1-1 Simple Federated Repository Community
Figure 4.1-1 depicts a simplified Federated Repository Community using UML notation and its ODP stereotypes as defined in the UML profile for ODP.
The community includes two community Roles: User and Repository. The community is of relevance to many scenarios currently being considered by the requirements elicitation project, but we use the "Federated discovery, searching, and data aggregation" scenario for illustrating the points in Forum Scenarios.
The objective of this community is to support access to the Federated Repository system by various types of users (e.g., researchers or curators). Note that there is a UML package called Policies as a placeholder for policies that affect the behavior of entities taking roles in the community.
