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caBIG® Semantic Infrastructure - Overview - Initiative 3
Rules management and contracts support (behavioral semantics)
Business and policy rules management components are largely a new resource area. A means for authoring and managing rules (as described in RM-ODP and the "Contracts Design" section of this document) for behavioral semantics is neededMuch of clinical care information exchange is mediated by service contracts reflecting HL7 conventions. Contracts are vital to environments where regulatory, privacy, and business considerations must be enforced. The contract specifications (see Figure 3) need to be persisted and managed over their life-timeand some provision made must be made by each implementation for run time support of contracts (see Figure 4). A Policy and Rules Management resource would enable definition and storage of the enterprise level business activities and role relationships between actors; the roles, behaviors and conformance points and other factors required to persist contract definitions for access by would be implementations. This initiative will define the rules management architecture and design and implement an initial Policy and Rules Management resource. This will involve resolving numerous open issues. For example there are alternative approaches to rule representation (OCL, SBVRetc.)
The initiative will analyze them and match them against available use cases.
Rules management must provide for predictable transformation of pre-described rules in user applications. Development of this capability is the principal focus of this Initiative.
In addition however some form of concept resolution is required for Rules Management. Determination of the semantic equivalence of concept expressions means that information model primitives to be matched share an underlying ontology, or have access to a cross-ontology mapping (a driver for Initiative 5). A framework such as ISO 19763 in which domain specific ontology is used to provide semantics for policy and rule expression. RGPS Metamodel Framework for Interaction Between Cloud and Client presentation
This would limit the ability of the Rules Management service to recognize equivalent concepts expressions to contexts in which the business case for creation of expensive maps is justified or in which regulation requires all to use a single terminology. However there may be opportunities to use machine learning or other software engineering techniques and frameworks to reduce the burden of manual ontology mapping, or to use federated ontologies to largely escape the need for maps. Therefore this Initiative will also include limited testing and analysis of alternative approaches to making Concept Resolution more semantically capable and less dependent on expensive mapping activities, although its applicability/usefullenss in a Policy and Rules may be limited due to the veru nature/need for precise interpretation of contracts.
Requirements
;Initiative 3 section of the Requirements/Initiatives Master List
Forum
;Initiative 3 - Rules management and contracts support (behavioral semantics)
