Minimized Domain Knowledge for SOA-Based Interoperability

The variety and heterogeneity of legacy systems at the application level have contributed to the complexity of interoperability provision among different application domains. In this context, most research activities are focused towards standardization and interoperability among the legacy systems within the same domain. However, an emerging challenge is to address the communication of information among heterogeneous legacy systems in different domains. The first step in achieving such a large interoperability is to follow similar development processes for collaborating domains, which provides homogeneity in their architectures. The second step would be to provide cross-domain semantic interoperability through proprietary and shared ontology systems. In this paper, we address the above challenges through description of a framework that employs healthcare standards and clinical terminology systems to achieve semantic interoperability between distributed systems in different domains. The main focus in our proposed framework is the minimal use of domain knowledge for cross-domain interoperability. Two case studies are provided, first we present how HL7 v3 is over-specified and then the proposed framework is applied to achieve semantic interoperability between two domains healthcare and insurance.