Heterogeneous Information Systems Integration: Organizations and Methodologies

In the changing digital environment, universities face the necessity of integrating heterogeneous information systems. This study focuses on a set-theoretic approach to modeling the integration of these systems. It considers the construction of a model that will effectively facilitate interaction among various information resources within the university, belonging to different platforms and formats. Special attention is paid to optimizing data exchange processes and ensuring information integrity within the common digital space of the university. This work proposes a formal integration model that allows minimizing architectural coupling and ensuring the evolutionary development of the university's digital platform. The set-theoretic apparatus is used to formalize the IT landscape. A decomposition method based on the concept of "architectural quanta" (Architectural Quantum) is applied. Metrics of structural autonomy are proposed to assess effectiveness. A formal model describing the university's information system as a collection of loosely coupled quanta is introduced. An architectural integrity condition is established, prohibiting integration through shared databases. A structural autonomy coefficient (K_sa) is developed to quantitatively assess architectural quality. The model serves as a theoretical basis for implementing automated architecture control systems based on specialized metrics (Fitness Functions) in CI/CD pipelines, which helps reduce technical debt and accelerate the launch of new educational services (Time-to-Market). The main research method employed is a set-theoretic approach to modeling the integration of heterogeneous information systems in the context of digitalization. The scientific novelty lies in applying the set-theoretic apparatus to describe and model the processes of data integration from various sources with differing structures and formats. The developed model provides a formalized representation of the integration relationships between information systems, allowing for the optimization of data exchange processes and enhancing the efficiency of the university's information resources. The research results indicate the high effectiveness of the proposed approach for creating a unified information space within the university, contributing to improved quality of education, scientific research, and managerial processes. Practical implementation of the model will enhance the university’s competitiveness in the digital economy. The feasibility of building a flexible and scalable system capable of adapting to new requirements and changes in the university's information environment is proven.

Intense competition drives the need for dynamic and flexible integration of dispersed and heterogeneous information systems. This paper proposes a semantic gateway architecture for system integration in networked manufacturing to solve the semantic heterogeneity problems. The system integration mode based on semantic gateway is set up to enable unified expression and analysis of the information to be integrated, so that the flexibility and transparency of integration between heterogeneous systems are significantly improved.

The picture archiving and communication system (PACS) originated as an image management system for improving the efficiency of radiologic practices. It has evolved into a hospital-integrated system that stores information media in many forms, including voice, text, medical records, waveform images, and video recordings. The integration of these various types of information requires the technology of multimedia, including hardware platforms, information systems and databases, communication protocols, display technology, and system interfacing and integration. The purpose of this book is to discuss the conceptual and technologic advances in PACS development for all of these previously mentioned technologies. The book also emphasizes the growing field of PACS-based imaging informatics, where existing PACS resources are used for largescale horizontal and longitudinal clinical service, research, and education applications. The book is intended for those who are involved in a health care environment that manages the everyday practical realities of PACS planning, operation, and maintenance. The book will also serve as excellent curriculum material for the training of PACS information technology personnel because the author provides comprehensive concepts that tie medical imaging, medical physics, information technology, and clinical workflow with enterprise PACS (multiple, hospital-wide PACS). The author, H. K. Huang, has been involved in PACS development since the 1980s and is a leading scientist in the field. The book is divided into five parts and 23 chapters. Part 1, titled “Medical Imaging Principles,” summarizes the history of PACS, the fundamental concepts of digital medical imaging, and the different types of modalities integrated into PACS. Part 2, titled “PACS Fundamentals,” describes in detail the PACS subsystems and industry standards (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine and Health Level 7) that are used to integrate PACS with the hospital information system and radiology information system. Part 3, titled “PACS Operation,” describes the practical problems encountered by PACS administrators and users and discusses different techniques to solve these problems, with many examples from installed PACS sites around the world. Because the author developed PACS at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1991 and the University of California, San Francisco, in 1995, he is able to draw from his expertise on the subject. The author also uses his experience from developing many state-of-theart prototypes (eg, fault tolerant storage system) funded by research grants. Part 4, titled “PACS-based Imaging Informatics,” presents image-processing techniques that can be used to mine the huge image and clinical data resources stored in the PACS archive. The analysis of lung nodules by using temporal computed tomographic and contentbased image indexing are some of the examples of advanced processing applications applied to PACS data mining. Part 5, titled “Enterprise PACS,” describes different models for implementing an enterprise PACS in terms of the architectural design of the system and financial and business models. This new book builds on two previous volumes on PACS that were written by the author. The text, image collections, and schematic diagrams in this current work achieve the author’s goal of providing up-to-date material concerning the technologic advances in PACS and imaging informatics. The text serves as a guide for those who are planning an enterprise PACS and provides teaching material for training PACS developers in industry and health care. The author has used portions of this book as lecture material for graduate courses at leading universities in the United States and abroad. The author also uses many examples to emphasize that the integration of heterogeneous health care information systems is becoming more complex and that, as more radiologists and clinicians expect higher standards in the reliability of the data, a systemic understanding of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine, Health Level 7, and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise becomes ever more important to optimize enterprise workflow. The strength of the book lies in the vast experience that the author, who has implemented PACS at numerous institutions in the United States and abroad, has transmitted into this new book. Huang has conducted first-hand analysis of the various systems from PACS manufacturers that are used in clinical operation at large medical institutions and has performed up-to-date research in data mining of the huge image and data resources stored in the PACS repository.

PurposeThe initiative to develop integrated information systems (IIS) for the construction industry has been a strategic focus in various countries. However, the absence of a framework to plan, develop and manage IS has led to various challenges and prevented these IIS from achieving their objectives. The purpose of this paper is to propose the conceptual framework of IIS for the Indonesian construction industry.Design/methodology/approachData were collected through a questionnaire survey and then validated through the focus group discussion conducted by 14 experts whom we selected rigorously. The content and descriptive analyses were adopted to determine the level of importance and concerns for each component and factor expressed by respondents.FindingsThe conceptual framework of IIS for the Indonesian construction industry consists of five components: business environment, organization environment, information systems (IS) integration, alignment of IS with business and impact on organization or industry. By integrating business and organization environments, IS integration and alignments with business and impact, the framework offers a comprehensive systems approach to IS integration that is both practical and theoretically sound.Originality/valueThe paper offers a perspective on IIS in developing countries, focusing on Indonesia. This study provides valuable insights for construction practitioners to understand the implications of IS integration and serves as a tool to design and develop more effective information technology (IT) solutions. Additionally, it aids governmental bodies in formulating policies to support the Integrated Construction Services Information System (ICSIS) program to realize the Indonesian One Data Initiative (IODI).

Each person interacts with multiple health institution’s systems along their life. These systems are usually developed to fulfill the specific needs of sanitary organizations or Web of Medical Things manufacturers. However, most of the times these information systems aren’t interconnected, making it very difficult to put in common the information of a patient scattered in various systems. Thus, it’s necessary to develop solutions that allow health information systems developers to consult all the information of an user across the multiple health’s information systems it is scattered and to offer this information organized as the Personal Health Trajectory of the user (a succession of Personal Health Records ordered by time). This paper proposes a solution for the integration of heterogeneous health information systems, the processing of their data and its provisioning in a health trajectory perspective through an API. Thus, software developers of healthcare solutions can leverage this API to develop a new generation of person-oriented solutions.

The logistics industry currently faces a prevalent "data silo" issue. This leads to information isolation and system fragmentation and severely restricts the ability of cross-platform business collaboration and intelligent decision-making. To address this problem, this paper proposes a non-intrusive logistics system architecture design for data silo integration. The architecture is based on key mechanisms such as edge access, protocol abstraction, and a unified data bus. It realizes lightweight integration of heterogeneous logistics information systems, and features low coupling, high compatibility, and strong adaptability. The designed system includes acquisition layer protocol adaptation components, transport layer edge routing mechanisms, and platform layer intelligent processing engines. It supports multi-protocol concurrent access and fault self-recovery capabilities. Deployment and testing in enterprise scenarios show that the system outperforms traditional solutions in data acquisition delay control, stability maintenance, and multi-protocol adaptation. The non-intrusive system not only leads significantly in throughput, reaching 12,000 entries per second. This is much higher than the 7,500 entries per second of traditional Application Programming Interface (API) integration and the 9,200 entries per second of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture. It also performs excellently in average response time, which is only 45 milliseconds, significantly lower than the other two solutions. In particular, this system achieves efficient integration without modifying the original systems and effectively solves the problem of coexisting multi-systems and non-interoperable data in enterprises. This paper provides a promotable reference architecture for the informatization transformation of logistics.

In this paper we sketch an approach to the integration of heterogeneous tourist information systems into database federations. Since many tourist information systems offer WWW-interfaces based on HTML-files and furthermore, many local information systems are based on specific file formats, we have to consider such file associations. For the integration of these file associations, the main problem is the lack of meta-information. Therefore, we have to derive an appropriate local conceptual schema. The derived conceptual schemata and the schemata of other tourist database systems will be integrated into a federated schema. Moreover, we briefly discuss the benefits of a federated tourist information system.

The mediator-based system integrates heterogeneous information systems with the flexible manner. But it does not give much attention on the query optimization issues, especially for the query reusing. The other thing is that it does not use standardized metadata for schema matching. To improve this two issues, we propose mediator-based Distributed Information Integration System (DIIS) which uses query caching regarding performance and uses ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry in terms of standardization. The DIIS is designed to provide decision-making support, which logically integrates the distributed heterogeneous business information systems based on the Web environment. We designed the system in the aspect of three-layer expression formula architecture using the layered pattern to improve the system reusability and to facilitate the system maintenance. The functionality and flow of core components of three-layer architecture are expressed in terms of process line diagrams and assembly line diagrams of Eriksson Penker Extension Model (EPEM), a methodology of an extension of UML. For the implementation, Supply Chain Management (SCM) domain is used. And we used the Web-based environment for user interface. The DIIS supports functions of query caching and query reusability through Query Function Manager (QFM) and Query Function Repository (QFR) such that it enhances the query processing speed and query reusability by caching the frequently used queries and optimizing the query cost. The DIIS solves the diverse heterogeneity problems by mapping MetaData Registry (MDR) based on ISO/IEC 11179 and Schema Repository (SCR).

The capability to provide a platform for flexible business services in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) domain is both a major success factor for the ATM industry and a challenge to integrate a large number of complex and heterogeneous information systems. Most of the system knowledge needed for integration is not available explicitly in machine-understandable form, resulting in time-consuming and error-prone human tasks.In this paper we propose a knowledge-based ap-proach, Semantically-Enabled Externalization of Knowledge for the ATM domain (SEEK-ATM), which explicitly models a) expert knowledge on specific heterogeneous systems and integration requirements; and b) allows mapping of the specific knowledge to the general ATM problem domain knowledge for semantic integration. The domain-specific modeling enables a) to verify the integration knowledge base as requirements specification for later design of technical systems integration and b) to provide an API to the prob-lem space knowledge to facilitate tool support for efficient and effective systems integration. Based on an industry case study, we evaluate effects of the proposed SEEK-ATM approach in comparison to traditional system integration approaches in the ATM domain.

Sequential configuration is a fundamental pattern that occurs when integrating systems that span domains and levels of abstraction. This task requires the integration of heterogeneous autonomous information systems, processes, and applications. We propose an extensible system for correlating sequential configurations across loosely-coupled systems. Our framework defines fundamental abstractions and interfaces that enable the implementation of domain-specific models. We build upon our framework to provide a suite of tools to support applications that manage the configuration lifecycle. Our implemented prototype application integrates the processes, tools, and data involved in the first two stages of the IT outsourced services contract lifecycle.

Metadata is defined as data about data. In large scale distributed and heterogeneous software systems, metadata is considered as one of the most important components for the architecture and construction of information systems. Metadata is utilized to improve communication between heterogeneous information systems – for the purposes of obtaining and providing information, for communication between user client workstations and information servers, and for electronic business between information systems. Metadata management is much challenging and is a hot topic for research at present. In this paper, we review work that deals with effective indexed data for mobile service management metadata in three different points of view. Firstly, we survey some proposals about applying model management to classical metadata problems. Then we inspect how metadata can help managing multimedia data. Finally, we review some mobile service specific metadata management issues. We survey approaches that are of foundational nature as well as those that are application-oriented. We believe that combining both foundational and practical aspects is important to achieve the goal of managing metadata with the same ease as, for example, database management systems have achieved in the management of classical relational data.

The development of healthcare systems in accordance to the “Shared Care” paradigm results in co-operative health information systems across the boundaries of organisational, technological, and policy domains. Increasingly, these distributed and heterogeneous systems are based on middleware approaches, such as CORBA. Regarding the sensitivity of personal and medical data, such open, distributed, and heterogeneous health information systems demand a high level of data protection and data security, both with respect to patient information and with respect to users. The security concepts and measures available and additionally needed in health information systems based on CORBA architecture are described in this paper. The proposed security solution is also open to other middleware approaches, such as DHE or HL7.

It is generally acknowledged that integration of large-scale information systems is a challenging problem. A domain that particularly encounters this problem currently is healthcare, where information systems tend to be heterogeneous and in constant evolution. A particular need for health professionals is the ability to ask medical questions across a heterogeneous information system, then visualise and analyse the results in a synthetic and coherent manner. In this paper, we present a case study of a heterogeneous data source search meta-engine framework, based on category theory. This framework addresses the problem of cross-interrogation of heterogeneous data sources, such as relational database management systems, documentary database systems, or collections of documents. It additionally attempts to address the problem of constant evolution of such information systems. The framework has been successfully applied to the biomedical data of the medical information system at the Institut Curie, a major French cancer care centre. Different aspects of this work are illustrated, such as the mathematical foundations of the Prométhée framework, the methodology used for its implementation, and the impact that Prométhée has encountered since its deployment in a hospital environment.KeywordsCategory TheoryMedical Information SystemConstant EvolutionRelational Database Management SystemHeterogeneous Data SourceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Many companies have been forced to quickly respond to changing user needs. To provide more convenient services to consumers, the cooperation within a company or across companies have been requested. As a result, the heterogeneous information systems are also requested to be integrated together. By utilizing the heterogeneity among systems and by cooperating between systems, it becomes possible to draw out new values from them without violating each system's characteristic. In the heterogeneous systems, such as the data generation timings or frequencies are different, the data synchronization itself should be done by each system without relying on the single coordinator, because the system configurations are always changing, and members of application group which use synchronous data combination are also changing. In this paper we propose the autonomous data synchronization technique in the heterogeneous systems. The application objects which requires the synchronous combination of the data in each system can locally judge which combination of data is most adequate as the synchronous combination by comparing the synchronous information with others. Thus all systems can use the consistent combination as the synchronous data only by collecting the data locally and exchanging the synchronous information. In addition, the cost of synchronization in each system, which is measured by the synchronization waiting time (SWT) and backward data utilization (BDU) becomes even. As this proposed method is not relying on the single coordinator, it works correctly even if the system configuration is dynamically changed, or even if members of SyncApps are changed. The simulation results show the cost fairness when three systems are interconnected in straight line.

In many jurisdictions, patients are being increasingly empowered to play a critical role in defining how their medical information can be collected, used and shared across various healthcare data custodians. This patient-centric focus on information custody and management, along with the highly distributed nature of medical information, introduces new access control challenges related to privacy and security of medical information. As a result, when exchanging medical information across systems under different administrative domains, traditional access control models are not effective to enforce patient privacy preferences. To address this challenge, we propose an access control scheme that is patient-centric and offers a consent-based access control solution usable across heterogeneous medical information systems. Our model utilizes a logic-based approach to make inferences about access control decisions, and uses ontology-based knowledge representation to ensure that privacy preferences are correctly understood and applied. All system-level access control decisions can be automated and independently verified for validity and correctness. Our proposed solution offers a flexible and robust model that is most suited for the demanding access control scenarios present in patient care.