Information systems interoperability

The effects of tie strength and data integration with supply base on supply disruption ambiguity and its impact on inventory turnover

Purpose

In this paper, the authors introduce supply disruption ambiguity as the inability of a sourcing firm to attach probability point estimates to the occurrence of and to the magnitude of loss from supply disruptions. The authors drew on the “ambiguity in decision-making” literature to define this concept formally, connected it to relevant supply disruption information deficit, positioned it relative to supply chain risk assessment and hypothesized and tested its negative associations with both supply base ties and inventory turnover.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors analysed survey data from 171 North American manufacturers and archival data for a subset (88 publicly listed) of these manufacturers via Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation after ensuring that methodological concerns with survey research have been addressed. They used appropriate controls and employed the heteroskedasticity-based instrumental variable (HBIV) approach to ensure that inferences from our results are not unduly influenced by endogeneity.

Findings

Strong supply base ties decrease supply disruption ambiguity, which, in turn, increases inventory turnover. Moreover, strong supply base ties and data integration with the supply base have indirect and positive effects on inventory turnover. As sourcing firms strengthen ties and integrate data exchange with their supply base, their inventory turnover improves from access to information relevant to detect and diagnose supply disruptions effectively.

Originality/value

Research on supply disruption management has paid more attention to the “disruption recovery” stage than to the “disruption discovery” stage. In this paper, the authors add novel insights regarding the recognition and diagnosis aspects of the “disruption discovery” stage. These novel insights reveal how and why sourcing firms reduce their overall ambiguity associated with detecting and assessing losses from supply disruptions through establishing strong ties with their supply base and how and why reducing such ambiguity improves inventory turnover performance.

Using microdata for international e-Government data exchange: The case of social security domain

Semantic interoperability issues of international e-Government data exchanges have not been solved up until now. In the case of social security institutions, the data exchange operations have some particularities that make that the non-ambiguous definition of core concepts used in the institutions has a key impact on the success and quality of system interconnections. In this article, we present the result of a research to implement a new metadata specification based in Dublin Core elements for international social security exchanges, named Exchange Social Security Information Metadata (ESSIM). This proposal is based in a semantic approach using Linked Data for Interoperability, with technologies, such as RDF(S), SPARQL, Microdata and JSON-LD, in order to ensure interoperability between social security institutions from different countries. This will help to strengthen the protection of the social security rights of mobile workers by automating the application of international agreements on social security and to improve cross border communication between social security institutions of different countries. For the near future, the goal is to include this specification as part of information and communication technology Guidelines under development by International Social Security Association with the participation of authors of this article. This will facilitate a future adoption of the specification as an international standard.

Ontologies for Platform as Service APIs Interoperability

Ontologies can be used to describe common cloud functionalities and enable common terminology to assist in cloud interoperability. In this work, we have developed the ontology for resources and operations and the ontology of interoperability problems. The aim is to clearly describe and categorize the existing functionalities, features and specificities of commercial platform asaservice offers. The first ontology also provides data type mappings among different Paa Sstorages and cross-Paa Sdata types used in inputs and outputs of the remote APIoperations to provideacommon layer for information exchange and data migration among different Paa Sproviders. The ontologies were evaluated by tools and by human experts. Furthermore, the ontologies were used in cloud interoperability prototype to show their practical applicability.

A unified structural/terminological interoperability framework based on LexEVS: application to TRANSFoRm

OBJECTIVE

Biomedical research increasingly relies on the integration of information from multiple heterogeneous data sources. Despite the fact that structural and terminological aspects of interoperability are interdependent and rely on a common set of requirements, current efforts typically address them in isolation. We propose a unified ontology-based knowledge framework to facilitate interoperability between heterogeneous sources, and investigate if using the LexEVS terminology server is a viable implementation method.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

We developed a framework based on an ontology, the general information model (GIM), to unify structural models and terminologies, together with relevant mapping sets. This allowed a uniform access to these resources within LexEVS to facilitate interoperability by various components and data sources from implementing architectures.

RESULTS

Our unified framework has been tested in the context of the EU Framework Program 7 TRANSFoRm project, where it was used to achieve data integration in a retrospective diabetes cohort study. The GIM was successfully instantiated in TRANSFoRm as the clinical data integration model, and necessary mappings were created to support effective information retrieval for software tools in the project.

CONCLUSIONS

We present a novel, unifying approach to address interoperability challenges in heterogeneous data sources, by representing structural and semantic models in one framework. Systems using this architecture can rely solely on the GIM that abstracts over both the structure and coding. Information models, terminologies and mappings are all stored in LexEVS and can be accessed in a uniform manner (implementing the HL7 CTS2 service functional model). The system is flexible and should reduce the effort needed from data sources personnel for implementing and managing the integration.

Effect of organizational factors on interoperability adoption for Indian portals

Purpose

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of organizational factors on the adoption of interoperability technology for Indian portals.

Design/methodology/approach

This exploratory study was conducted through a survey questionnaire from 300 portals of government departments and public sector undertakings (PSUs) in India. Data were also collected from portals of Indian companies.

Findings

The study finds that adoption of interoperability for Indian portals is highly associated with certain organizational factors. In addition, multiple regression analysis reveals that the functionalities of government portals in India are significantly related to four organizational factors.

Practical implications

The research provides insights for government officials and practitioners to understand and improve the level of interoperability in government portals. The study also provides a 2 by 2 matrix framework that helps the government officials to focus on the relevant organizational factors.

Originality/value

This study is the first to examine the effect of organizational factors on interoperability adoption in Indian portals. The results lead to a number of recommendations for achieving interoperability for government portals in India.

TRIAD: The Translational Research Informatics and Data Management Grid

OBJECTIVE

Multi-disciplinary and multi-site biomedical research programs frequently require infrastructures capable of enabling the collection, management, analysis, and dissemination of heterogeneous, multi-dimensional, and distributed data and knowledge collections spanning organizational boundaries. We report on the design and initial deployment of an extensible biomedical informatics platform that is intended to address such requirements.

METHODS

A common approach to distributed data, information, and knowledge management needs in the healthcare and life science settings is the deployment and use of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Such SOA technologies provide for strongly-typed, semantically annotated, and stateful data and analytical services that can be combined into data and knowledge integration and analysis "pipelines." Using this overall design pattern, we have implemented and evaluated an extensible SOA platform for clinical and translational science applications known as the Translational Research Informatics and Data-management grid (TRIAD). TRIAD is a derivative and extension of the caGrid middleware and has an emphasis on supporting agile "working interoperability" between data, information, and knowledge resources.

RESULTS

Based upon initial verification and validation studies conducted in the context of a collection of driving clinical and translational research problems, we have been able to demonstrate that TRIAD achieves agile "working interoperability" between distributed data and knowledge sources.

CONCLUSION

Informed by our initial verification and validation studies, we believe TRIAD provides an example instance of a lightweight and readily adoptable approach to the use of SOA technologies in the clinical and translational research setting. Furthermore, our initial use cases illustrate the importance and efficacy of enabling "working interoperability" in heterogeneous biomedical environments.

An integrated framework to achieve interoperability in person-centric health management

The need for high-quality out-of-hospital healthcare is a known socioeconomic problem. Exploiting ICT's evolution, ad-hoc telemedicine solutions have been proposed in the past. Integrating such ad-hoc solutions in order to cost-effectively support the entire healthcare cycle is still a research challenge. In order to handle the heterogeneity of relevant information and to overcome the fragmentation of out-of-hospital instrumentation in person-centric healthcare systems, a shared and open source interoperability component can be adopted, which is ontology driven and based on the semantic web data model. The feasibility and the advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by presenting the use case of real-time monitoring of patients' health and their environmental context.

The ACGT Master Ontology and its applications--towards an ontology-driven cancer research and management system

OBJECTIVE

This paper introduces the objectives, methods and results of ontology development in the EU co-funded project Advancing Clinico-genomic Trials on Cancer-Open Grid Services for Improving Medical Knowledge Discovery (ACGT). While the available data in the life sciences has recently grown both in amount and quality, the full exploitation of it is being hindered by the use of different underlying technologies, coding systems, category schemes and reporting methods on the part of different research groups. The goal of the ACGT project is to contribute to the resolution of these problems by developing an ontology-driven, semantic grid services infrastructure that will enable efficient execution of discovery-driven scientific workflows in the context of multi-centric, post-genomic clinical trials. The focus of the present paper is the ACGT Master Ontology (MO).

METHODS

ACGT project researchers undertook a systematic review of existing domain and upper-level ontologies, as well as of existing ontology design software, implementation methods, and end-user interfaces. This included the careful study of best practices, design principles and evaluation methods for ontology design, maintenance, implementation, and versioning, as well as for use on the part of domain experts and clinicians.

RESULTS

To date, the results of the ACGT project include (i) the development of a master ontology (the ACGT-MO) based on clearly defined principles of ontology development and evaluation; (ii) the development of a technical infrastructure (the ACGT Platform) that implements the ACGT-MO utilizing independent tools, components and resources that have been developed based on open architectural standards, and which includes an application updating and evolving the ontology efficiently in response to end-user needs; and (iii) the development of an Ontology-based Trial Management Application (ObTiMA) that integrates the ACGT-MO into the design process of clinical trials in order to guarantee automatic semantic integration without the need to perform a separate mapping process.

Identifying Factors of Integration for an Interoperable Government Portal

Interoperability is an important pre-condition for achieving higher stages of e-government and further ensures that a one stop portal will become a reality. Interoperability results from vertical and horizontal integration. The question arises: How can the level of interoperability and degree of integration be ascertained? This paper suggests a framework. It begins by identifying critical factors necessary for the successful adoption of interoperability technology along three dimensions of integration—process integration, communication integration, and data integration. Factors are formed from a literature review and discussions with webmasters and IT professionals working on portal development in various government departments of India. These factors are useful in further evaluation across the three dimensions and locate the position of a government portal in a technology adoption space. It is then possible to ascertain a portal’s current level of integration sophistication.

A conceptual analysis of semantic conflicts in pan-European e-government services

This paper presents research in Pan-European Public Services (PEPS) and Pan-European E-Government Services (PEGS). We examine different types of semantic interoperability issues that may arise when actors, information and services from different Member States (MS) need to cooperate and/or interoperate during the public service provision process. The semantic conflict types that arise in these cases are identified and classified according to a typology that is based on the combination of a known classification for semantic conflicts and domain specific concepts from the Governance Enterprise Architecture object model. This conceptual modelling describes and organizes the problem space, documents the requirements and can thus provide the basis for engineering solutions to resolve the identified conflicts.