This section provides an overview of the key tools that are expected to address the Semantic Infrastructure requirements. Tools are a combination of applications, user interfaces and services that address a specific Semantic Infrastructure requirement. The tool description provides a user view of how the tools may be used to perform specific tasks.

This section includes the following:

ECCF Registry and User Interface

The ECCF registry interface will provide a single interface for accessing all the artifacts and service metadata. Users will be able to use the interface to perform:

Artifact Search and Access

• Search the registry for model
• Search CTS 2 for existing value sets
• Search the OID registry for an appropriate identifier route
• Retrieve an existing model from the registry
• Retrieve schemas and form definitions
• Import a new model for annotation (binding to terminology and value-sets)
• Retrieve the value set from CTS 2 and apply to the model attributes

Artifact Authoring

• Create a new value set (leveraging terminology services) and manage existing artifacts
• Register the object identifier with its metadata
• Register a new artifact in the registry with its metadata (including ECCF specific information), traceability to support provenance
• Link the models to existing models, domains, or both and classify artifacts
• Constrain existing models
• Constrain existing data-types
• Link artifacts to service specifications
• Dupport collaborative development of metadata

Artifact Governance and Lifecycle Management

• Initiate artifact workflow
• Monitor the workflow process
• Allow curators to set the status of a model and receive change notifications
• Customize review and approval workflows
• Govern collaborative development

Artifact Analysis

• Execute semantic queries for search and analysis

Access Control and Policy Management

• Establish templates and policies that can be applied to artifacts
• Link the users security and access rights to a particular governance and workflow
• Execute semantic queries for analysis
• Identify dependencies

Search and Access Services

• Discover services
• Execute complex queries to identify services
• Discover contracts at runtime

Administer Services and Specifications

• Create a new service specification
• Create and edit service metadata
• Link the artifacts to the service specification
• Construct conformance statements
• Run validations on specification and supporting artifacts
• Apply constraints, rules and policies
• Constrain and reuse existing specifications and artifacts

Analyze Services

• Execute semantic queries for analysis
• Perform impact analysis to identify dependencies and constraints

Service Governance and Workflows

• Initiate service specification governance
• Monitor the workflow and approval process
• Allow governance team to set the status of specification and promote
• Manage versioning and localization of the service specifications
• Govern collaborative development

Plug-ins, Loaders and Miscellaneous Development Tools

Plug-ins and development tools are extensions to existing tools to support better integration with the ECCF registry:

• Publish artifacts from eclipse and other modeling tools to the ECCF registry
• Publish content from external tools to the ECCF registry, with support for topic maps and DITA
• Extract and load metadata from artifacts into registry

Forms Editor

An end user tool for creating and editing forms:

• Create form definitions
• Retrieve models, data-types and value-sets
• Define skip patterns, layout and display options
• Publish forms to ECCF registry
• Reuse and leverage predefined templates

Conformance Testing Framework

A testing framework for developing automated test scripts that can be executed against an artifact or service.

• Retrieve artifact metadata and conformance statements
• Generate test scripts
• Execute conformance tests
• Generate conformance report

Knowledge Based Systems Support Tools

A set of knowledge engineering tools to support reasoning and inference use cases.

• Knowledge Representation Definition
• Rule Pattern Definition
• Domain Model Development
• Knowledge Base Model Definition
• Fact Generation and Mapping tooling
• Rule Generation tooling
• Reasoner Framework for Standard Knowledge-based System Development
• Automated Reasoning Service Publication