Application of Semantic Web Services for

Mobile Telemedicine Service Discovery

Tara Raafat and Franjo Cecelja

Department of Process and Information System Engineering

The University of Surrey,

Guildford, Surrey

United Kingdom

T.Raafat@surrey.ac.uk

Abstract— this paper introduces an ontological approach to

designing an integration platform for mobile telemedicine

(MTM) services based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

and Semantic Web technologies. The meta-ontology is the core

element of the platform, which coordinates the process of service

registration and discovery between heterogeneous tele-medical

applications, operating in a mobile environment while

considering mobile, medical and environmental dynamic

attributes.

Keywords-Mobile tele-medicine; Semantic Web Services; SOA;

Ontology

I. INTRODUCTION

Mobile technology has revolutionized many aspects of our lives. Medical domain is no exception. The wireless infrastructure is now capable of supporting healthcare applications by providing increased coverage and quality for data transfer [1]. Also, current studies indicate the fact that medical professionals and patients are showing greater acceptance of advanced technologies such as wireless communication and mobile devices to be used for medical purposes. Therefore, Mobile Telemedicine (MTM), which is a new and evolving area of telemedicine exploiting the recent development in mobile technologies; is now seeing a rapid growth. There is however, a genuine need for a common platform to allow interoperation between the services regardless of their underlying infrastructure. All MTM parties need to automatically discover each other and have access to required information and service. Typical examples are a hospital administrator in need of locating other hospitals that could provide certain surgery expertise or have a specific medical facility. Or, a patient wanting to locate the closest hospital or find a specialist for immediate consultation. By the same token it could be a doctor requiring a specialized laboratory for particular tests. It is evident that the current state of the art of these services does not provide any kind of interoperation platform that would enable automatic service discovery. This is mainly result of the fact that each service or application is designed and implemented for a specific scenario and at a syntactic level with pre-defined means of communication and data exchange formats.

II. CHALLENGES AND THE SEMANTIC APPROACH

A comprehensive MTM concept, as shown in Figure 1,

requires implementation of a service oriented architecture which not only provides syntactic information about the service, but has awareness of challenges and requirement enforced by the dynamically changing context of mobile environments including geographical (user/service location), environmental (available networks) or mobile associated (device capabilities and limitations) features.

Figure 1: a comprehensive MTM concept

While Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with web service implementation can provide the main infrastructure for the platform, it does not satisfy the requirement of full interoperability and automation .This is primarily because of low level of syntactic service description when using traditional web services. The syntactic description prohibits automation of service interaction and discovery while generating difficulties in terms of finding the right service match regarding accuracy and quality. A more detailed description of these short comes can be found in ref. [2].

The limitations of SOA has resulted in merger between web services architecture and semantic web comprising a new effort in distributed information systems known as semantic web services (SWS). The technology that is inthe heart of the semantic web and SWS is “Ontology”. Ontology in computer science is defined as the explicit specification of a conceptualization.

2011 35th IEEE Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference

0730-3157/11 $26.00 © 2011 Crown Copyright

DOI 10.1109/COMPSAC.2011.78

575

2011 35th IEEE Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference

0730-3157/11 $26.00 © 2011 Crown Copyright

DOI 10.1109/COMPSAC.2011.78

578

2011 35th IEEE Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference

0730-3157/11 $26.00 © 2011 Crown Copyright

DOI 10.1109/COMPSAC.2011.78

562

III. SYSTEM OVERVIEW

Considering the capabilities of SWS, we have introduced

an ontological approach to designing a platform for MTM service integration. This allows semantic enrichment of MTM services by registering all providers and users as a SWS. Users include hospitals, medical experts, mobile medical units, patients or any other stakeholder in the healthcare service. Although SWS allows automation of service discovery, existing SWS frameworks are still inflexible to fully support semantic heterogeneity. This heterogeneity arises from different perspectives that exist on modelling the domain knowledge. We have therefore introduced a meta-ontology to target this heterogeneity by providing a framework for shared definition of terms, resources and processes.

Figure 2 System Overview

More precisely, the meta-ontology incorporates ontologies in the domain of medicine, wireless network and mobile devices to provide the shared vocabulary needed for service description and respective coordinating activities.

The meta-ontology also guides the process of service registration. The web portal (Figure 2) is a dynamic interactive interface between the users and the semantic middleware which is controlled by the meta-ontology and created on the fly. This indicates that the page is customized according to the user registering with the system and the data to be displayed is extracted from the meta-ontology through reasoning and inference (automation) and then mapped to a pre-designed service description ontology. An instance of the service description ontology is then registered in the semantic repository. Furthermore, the meta-ontology coordinates the operation of matchmaker shown in Figure 2. While matching between current web services is only done at a syntactic level; Semantic web services allow explicit or inferred semantic relationships between requested and offered services to indicate a match. Services will be matched base upon functional and

non-functional attributes as well as their input and output. This type of match making enables utilizing services that did not exist or were not known at design time. However, due to semantic heterogeneity reconciliation is required prior to discovery, selection or invocation action. Using the meta-ontology for semantic service description augments the matching process as it addresses the semantic heterogeneity challenge by mapping all descriptions to a predefined semantic service description framework. The matching algorithm for the MTM services is enhanced and characterized by the specific types of factual knowledge regarding the discovery situation (e.g. emergency or non-emergency), the communication environment and the device capabilities and is processed in an iterative manner to discard irrelevant services before performing complicated computational algorithms and therefore speeding up the process.

IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

By providing a common platform and introducing the meta-

ontology to integrate common vocabulary and procedures for describing and registering the MTM services, we eliminate the need for mediation and tackle the problem of semantic heterogeneity. Also by registering all users as a service we allow a bidirectional service discovery which is an essential part of a comprehensive MTM platform and provide the possibility of interoperation of various MTM services regardless of their underlying structure or implementation. Furthermore service requests are described with higher precision using SWS description frameworks. This optimizes the process of service matching and allows the discovery of services which may not have been possible through the syntactic service matching.

Achievements to date include the design of the platform and part of the meta-ontology as well as the implementation of the dynamic web portal for service registration The ultimate objective is to provide an integration platform to allow interoperability of heterogeneous tele-medical applications, operating in mobile environment with a view to enhance service discovery considering mobile, medical and environmental attribute of the services. The future work includes focus on the synergy of mobile agents with semantic web services to integrate dynamic values in the service description. Providing an integration platform for MTM services enhances scalability and expands the availability of medical services across boundaries while allowing easier maintenance management and monitoring of distributed resources and offering cost effective medical solutions. The result facilitates the implementation trend of the concept of pervasive healthcare (anytime-anywhere).

REFERENCES

[1] Varshney U, “Pervasive Healthcare and Wireless Monitoring”, Springer Science and Business Media, 2007

[2] Raafat, T.; Cecelja, F.; , "An Ontological Approach to Inter-Operation of Mobile Services," New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS),

2011 4th IFIP International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1-4, 7-10 Feb. 2011

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