This study examines whether Canada’s military’s interoperability with the United States affects Canadian sovereignty. The literature dealing with this subject is highly polarized arguing that such interoperability either significantly reduces our sovereignty or that it is necessary to maintain it. Successive Canadian governments, for example, have traditionally supported the military view that high levels of interoperability with our allies are needed for operations to proceed safely and effectively and that this poses no cost to Canadian sovereignty. The interoperability critics strongly disagree, arguing that increased interoperability, especially if it is with the United States, will diminish our foreign policy independence, our ability to refuse US military adventures, and our domestic sovereignty. In a limited sense this division in the literature allows one to comprehend the broad contours of the issue. Otherwise, recent works are marked by shifting definitions and unclear methodologies. These shortcomings have led to a reliance on conjecture, with the critics predicting damaging “future implications” as a result of Canada’s interoperability policies while governments promise outright gains. As a result, the Canadian public that underwrites the financial costs of such multi-billion dollar investments as the new F-35 fighter have little to guide them in assessing the widely claimed interoperability and sovereignty benefits or costs of the purchase. This thesis set about correcting these shortcomings by examining Canada’s interoperability history, defining the terms, developing clear hypotheses, and then testing them against recent issues and events. These included Canada's response to 9/11 and our decisions to participate, or not, in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. These produced six case studies within which events were assessed against the hypotheses that test for sovereignty gains or losses. The subsequent evaluation concluded that Canadian sovereignty was rarely at risk from Canada's military interoperability policy and Canada was normally able to enjoy an independent foreign policy. The only area where there were successive sovereignty costs was when Canada became overly dependent on US capabilities. This thesis also argued that the methodology would be useful in gauging the sovereignty implications of future cooperative projects.

The management process of chronic diseases is longitudinal in nature. Patient records in electronic format provide information at the point of care and support decision-making processes. In our research, we analyzed the clinical pragmatics of Chronic Disease Management (CDM) and formulated a knowledge model to develop Ontology-based EMR. Our research involved knowledge abstraction, knowledge modeling, and ontology engineering. We applied the Knowledge Management approach to knowledge sources including medical literature, the Chronic Care Model (CCM), CPR Ontology and HL-7 RIM. We studied CDM in detail to abstract conceptual knowledge involved in the process of CDM. The abstracted knowledge was modeled into a formal model called CD-EMR Model. We adapted Methontology and developed an OWL-based ontology from the CD-EMR Model. We evaluated the ontology by instantiating longitudinal clinical cases of chronic diseases. CD-EMR ontology allows (a) computerization of longitudinal patient records, (b) semantic interoperability, and (c) reasoning for clinical decision support.

Darbe nagrinėjamos problemos, susijusios su šalies valdyme reikalingais pokyčiais. Naujoji paradigma - į vartotojus orientuotos suasmenintos paslaugos nagrinėjamos dviem aspektais: per sąveikios valdžios koncepciją, bei per besiūlių paslaugų modelį. Šios temos aktualumas grindžiamas didėjančiu informacinių technologijų poveikiu kuriant visuomenės gerovę. Pasaulyje formuojasi naujosios valdymo paradigmos, kurios reikalauja kokybiškumo bei didesnio efektyvumo, įtvirtinant orientaciją į vartotojus ir akcentuojant naują požiūrį į valdžios ir visuomenės bendradarbiavimą. Kai kuriose šalyse sąveikios valdžios ir besiūlių paslaugų koncepcija, užtikrinanti orientaciją į vartotojus, pamažu ima plisti. Lietuvoje šiuo metu gali būti įžvelgiama e. valdžios raida link sąveikios valdžios, tačiau ji vyksta lėtai, nėra pakankamai apčiuopiamų ir reikšmingų rezultatų. Viso darbo tikslas – išanalizuoti sąveikios valdžios ir besiūlių paslaugų modelius, raidos tendencijas ir taikymo galimybes. Tyrimo tikslas - pagal pasirinktus kriterijus įvertinti esamą situaciją Lietuvoje, nustatyti naujo modelio diegimo galimybes ir problemines sritis. Tyrimas atskleidė, jog pagrindiniai trukdžiai, kurie neigiamai veikia sąveikios valdžios ir besiūlių paslaugų formavimą yra susiję su žmogiškuoju indėliu. Darbe pateikti pagrindiniai pasiūlymai, kurie padėtų situaciją pakeisti, o jų įgyvendinimas taptų pirmuoju žingsniu Lietuvai einant link orientacijos į vartotojus, per sąveikios valdžios ir besiūlių paslaugų... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Master thesis analyses problems related to changes necessary in the governing system of the country. Citizen-centric services are analysed from two points of view: through the concept of ‘connected government‘ and through the model of seamless services. The importance of the topic is based on the increasing impact of information technologies on the establishment of public welfare. New paradigms of administration, requiring quality and higher efficiency, are forming in the world and citizen-centric and new attitude towards cooperation between the society and government bodies are gaining stronger position. Overview of foreign practices allows to draw a conclusion that the concept of ‘connected government‘ and seamless services, ensuring citizen-centrics is starting to spread. The headway of the government of Lithuania towards ‘connected government‘ can be observed but it is slow, without visible and significant results. The overall aim of the thesis is to analyse the models of ‘connected government‘ and seamless services, the tendencies of their development and possibilities of application. A survey of present situation in Lithuania based on chosen criteria and to define the possibilities of implementation of the new model and possible problematic fields. The survey has shown that the main obstacles, that have negative influence on the formation of ‘connected government‘ and seamless services are related to human contribution. The thesis provides main propositions how to... [to full text]

In the field of networking, testing of communication protocols is an important activity to validate protocol applications before commercialisation. Generally, the services that must be provided by a protocol are described in its specification(s). A specification is generally a standard defined by standards bodies such as ISO (International Standards Organization), IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), ITU (International Telecommunication Union), etc. The purpose of testing is to verify that the protocol implementations work correctly and guarantee the quality of the services in order to meet customers expectations. To achieve this goal, a variety of testing methods have been developed. Among them, interoperability testing is to verify that several network components cooperate correctly and provide expected services. Conformance testing verifies that a product conforms to its specification. Robustness testing determines the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions. In this thesis, we focus on interoperability testing. The general architecture of interoperability testing involves a system under test (SUT), which consists of at least two implementations under test (IUT). The objectives of interoperability testing are to ensure that interconnected protocol implementations are able to interact correctly and, during their interaction, provide the services predefined in their specifications. In general, the methods of interoperability testing can be classified into two approaches: active and passive testing. Among them, active test is the most conventionally used technique, which aims to test the implementations (IUT) by injecting a series of test messages (stimuli) and observing the corresponding outputs. However, the intrusive nature of active testing is that the tester has the ability to control IUTS. This implies that the tester interrupts inevitably the normal operations of the system under test. In this sense, active testing is not a suitable technique for interoperability testing, which is often carried out in operational networks. In such context, it is difficult to insert arbitrary testing messages without affecting the normal behavior and the services of the system. On the contrary, passive testing is a technique based only on observation. The tester does not need to interact with the SUT. This allows the test to be carried out without disturbing the normal operations of the system under test. Besides, passive testing also has other advantages such as: for embedded systems to which the tester does not have direct access, test can still be performed by collecting the execution traces of the system and then detect errors by comparing the trace with the behavior of the system described in its specification. In addition, passive testing makes it possible to moniter a system over a long period, and report abnomality at any time.

Engineering effective knowledge exchange pathways between scientists and clinicians will accelerate the development and improvement of clinical treatments extracted from lab bench experiments. Many standards development organizations in the field of translational research informatics have attempted to prescribe mechanisms which would provide these knowledge exchange pathways; however, concrete implementations of these standards and the software structures which support them are still lacking. We have explored key technologies and techniques which may facilitate knowledge exchange through clinical coding, a domain specific version of the more general technique of semantic annotation. During the development process we identified and provided potential solutions to four primary problem areas in engineering software enabled knowledge exchange pathways for translational research: architecture, terminology, validation and interface design. We provide both a technical and practical evaluation of a multicomponent architecture which was conceived as a mechanism for producing knowledge exchange pathways between researchers in the field of cancer informatics; however, the principles and process which we apply to cancer informatics could easily be applied to other areas of clinical informatics.

Healthcare Informatics suffers from the lack of information exchange among domain partners. Allowing cooperation among distributed and heterogeneous applications is a major need of current healthcare information systems. Beyond the communication and integration problems, medical information itself is by nature complex, combined with data and knowledge. The increasing number of standards and representation of the same data in different structures using these standards constitute another problem in the domain. Platform and implementation independency makes Web service technology the natural way to solve the interoperability problems in the healthcare domain. Standardizing the access to data through WSDL and SOAP rather than standardizing the electronic health record will help to overcome the integration problems among different standards in medical information systems. However, introducing Web services to the healthcare systems will not suffice to solve the problems in the domain unless the semantics of the services are exploited. This thesis aims to show that by generating web services and classifying these services through their functionalities, it is possible to achieve the interoperability among healthcare institutes, such as hospitals. The designed system is based on Artemis P2P Framework, and the annotation of the system is realized in the same framework.

Members of distributed teams often have difficulty sharing unique information with their teammates during decision making tasks. These communication problems may hinder the development of cognitions that allow team members to reach a similar understanding of the content and structure of task information. The C-MAP intervention (Rentsch, Delise, & Hutchison, 2008) was designed to assist team members in sharing their information through behaviors that convey the content and structure of information by using specific communication behaviors and developing a knowledge object. In the present study, the knowledge object took the form of a white board where information was posted and organized. The development of the team knowledge object was the focus of the study. Using the knowledge object, team members could post a piece of unique information, highlight it, and organize it into clusters, thereby illustrating the content and structure of information through knowledge object development (KOD) behaviors. The present study evaluated the relationships among four types of KOD behaviors (posting content, highlighting content, conveying structure within domain, and conveying structure across domains) used to externalize pieces of unique information and two team cognition variables (transferred and interoperable knowledge) that develop with respect to each piece of unique information. Results provided evidence that posting content behaviors and highlighting content behaviors were positively related to transferred knowledge. Results also indicated that conveying structure within domain behaviors were negatively related to interoperable knowledge. However, conveying structure across domains behaviors were positively related to interoperable knowledge. Implications of these findings for the C-MAP intervention and suggestions for future research are presented.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / It is difficult to decide when to replace (major components of) information systems (IS) used in large organisations. Obstacles include not only the cost and the technical complexities but also the fact that the workplace is dependent on the current IS and the users have familiarity with their functionalities. The problems become more complicated with increasing need for IS interconnectivity within and between organisations. Formal guidelines to assist in making replacement decisions are not commonly used. This thesis aims to develop a model of key factors involved in the IS replacement decision and to investigate the role of interoperability in this decision. It concentrates on the healthcare domain in NSW, Australia, which represents a complex distributed multilevel organisation, which has identified interoperability as a problem and has started initiatives to improve it. Research in IS and software engineering has shed light on many of the issues associated with the replacement decision. For example, studies in technology acceptance have explained why organisations delay in moving to new technologies, and modelled the effect of increasing popularity of such technologies. IS success models have explored the factors that contribute to success and failure of deployed systems, providing checklists to assess the appropriateness of current systems from the point of view of the users and other organisational stakeholders. Research into the value of user feedback has helped managers to align user expectations with workplace IS. In terms of software function, metrics have been developed to measure a range of factors including performance, usability, efficiency and reliability that help determine how well the systems are performing from a technical perspective. Additional research has identified important points to consider when comparing custom made systems versus buying off-the-shelf systems, such as skill availability and after sale support. Maturity models and life cycle analyses consider the effect of age on IS, and Lehman’s laws of software evolution highlight the need for maintenance if an IS is to survive. Improvements in interoperability at the information level have been achieved through domain specific standards for data integrity, and modular approaches for partial changes in IS. In particular, the healthcare domain has developed a number of standardised terminological systems such as SNOMED, LOINC, ICD and messaging standards such as HL7. Template high level data models have also been trialled as a way to ensure new IS remain compatible with existing systems. While this literature partially covers and contributes to the understanding of when and how to replace IS and/or components, to our knowledge there has been no attempt to provide an integrated model identifying factors to be considered in the replacement decision. The thesis adopts a multi method approach to build a model of IS replacement and to explore aspects of interoperability. Preliminary factors and their potential interactions were first identified from the literature. In depth interviews were conducted with 10 experts and 2 IS users to investigate the validity and importance of the factors and interactions and to elicit further potential items. The analysis of the transcripts guided review of further literature and contemporary data, which led to the development of a final model and insights into the role of interoperability. A member check was used to validate both the model and the researcher’s conclusions on interoperability. The final model is centred about the change request, that is, any request made by or on behalf of an executive officer in order to maintain or replace part or all of an IS. The change request is informed by user feedback but our research distinguishes the two factors because the change request factor filters and manages requests for change from multiple sources. Other factors that have an important direct or indirect effect on generating change requests include: the extent of system specialisation, that is, how the system is tailored to satisfy organisational requirements; popularity, the degree to which an IS or a component is liked or supported by its user community; the prevalence and severity of errors and failures in the systems; the usability and performance of the systems; and the adequacy of support, including training, documentation, and so on. The dependent factors are maintenance and replacement, determined through the change requests. The validation through member checking showed that IS practitioners found our model useful in explaining the replacement process. The model provided an interpretation of the change requests. By exposing and clustering reasons behind the change requests, the complexity of deciding whether to maintain or replace system components can be reduced. Individual factors can be addressed more specifically. Formal guidelines on whether to maintain or replace components or entire IS can be drawn up using this understanding. The factors and their interactions as explained in the model could be the basis of a decision tree, which would be customised for organisational jargon and priorities. The requirement for interoperability is an aspect of system specialisation. An important finding from the research was that one of the most significant reasons to change a system is when problems are encountered in exchanging data and information. Conversely, as long as systems can exchange data, there is less pressure to replace them. Organisations benefit more from systems that provide more support for interoperability. Findings on interoperability in the health domain were that existing messaging standards (mostly HL7) used in the information exchange between subsystems including legacy databases are useful and are used. Also, ambiguities are diminished with vocabularies (mostly SNOMED, LOINC and ICD are used in NSW health domain). However, a methodology known as Interoperability Framework supported by government funding bodies for comparing data models has not been adopted and is not given any significant credit by the users. Likewise, a government proposal to use an overarching high level data model has not been adopted, in part because it is too complex. To guide use of such a data model requires a methodology for comparing data models: an example of such a methodology is developed in this thesis. The thesis research found that replacement decisions in the healthcare domain are affected by the existing quasi-monopoly of large vendors which tend to use proprietary standards that limit interoperability. The research concludes that interoperability should be achieved by increased use of vendor-independent messaging and terminological standards. In order to get the co-operation of individual health institutions within the domain, initial investments should be concentrated on simple and easy to adopt standards. A primary limitation of this thesis is the extent of testing of the findings. Data from a broader range of organisations, in different sectors and different countries, is needed to validate the model and to guide development of decision making tools that are based on it. Particularly valuable would be case studies of IS replacement decision making and the process which executives use in determining change requests. The priorities of the factors and their attributes as well as the strengths of the relationships in the model need to be tested empirically using tailored survey instruments. Another interesting research avenue which was only touched on in the thesis was the effect of policies and legislation on interoperability and on replacement decisions.

Η ψηφιακή εποχή για πολλά ευρωπαϊκά αρχεία, βιβλιοθήκες και μουσεία δεν αποτελεί πλέον επιλογή, αλλά πραγματικότητα. Η μετατροπή του πολιτισμικού περιεχομένου όλων των ειδών σε bits και bytes ανοίγει νέους ορίζοντες στην προσέγγιση παραδοσιακού και νέου κοινού, προσφέροντας πρόσβαση σε πολιτισμικές πηγές με τρόπους ασύλληπτους δεκαετίες πριν. Επίσης, οι ανάγκες για αποτελεσματική και εύκολη πρόσβαση σε γεωγραφικές πληροφορίες έχουν αυξηθεί θεαματικά τα τελευταία χρόνια λόγω του αυξανόμενου πλήθους εφαρμογών που χρησιμοποιούν χωρικά δεδομένα, της γενικότερης πολιτικής για ελευθερία πρόσβασης σε πληροφορίες, και της τεχνολογικής εξέλιξης που έχει επιβάλλει νέα φιλοσοφία και νέες δυνατότητες στην πρόσβαση και συσχέτιση δεδομένων. Για να εξυπηρετηθούν αποτελεσματικά οι ανάγκες αυτές, απαιτείται μια ευρεία λειτουργικότητα μεταξύ συστημάτων, δεδομένων και διαδικασιών, γνωστή ως διαλειτουργικότητα. Η διαλειτουργικότητα, τουλάχιστον όσον αφορά την πρόσβαση σε πληροφορίες και τη μεταφορά τους, υλοποιείται μέσω της τυποποίησης τόσο της δομής και της σημασίας τους (content, representation, semantics), όσο και της μορφής μεταφοράς (format) μέσα από ένα σύνολο κανόνων που συνιστούν αυτό που ονομάζεται πρότυπο. Η απαίτηση των χρηστών για υιοθέτηση προτύπων εκτιμάται ότι θα είναι έντονη τα επόμενα χρόνια, ενώ η διαμόρφωση και καθιέρωση ενός τυποποιημένου τρόπου ανταλλαγής δεδομένων φαίνεται ότι είναι η μόνη που μπορεί να διαφυλάξει από απώλεια επενδύσεων σε ήδη παραχθέντα δεδομένα αλλά και εξοικονόμηση χιλιάδων ανθρωποωρών, που τώρα αναλίσκονται για τη διαμόρφωση κατά περίπτωση προγραμμάτων - μεταφραστών, για αντιμετώπιση άμεσων αναγκών. Η παρούσα διπλωματική εργασία επικεντρώνεται στα διαφορετικά πρότυπα τυποποίησης της σημασίας της πληροφορίας, των μεταδεδομένων. Συγκεκριμένα στα μεταδεδομένα της πολιτισμικής και γεωγραφικής πληροφορίας. Αναφέρονται λοιπόν τα δημοφιλέστερα πρότυπα μεταδεδομένων πολιτιστικής και γεωγραφικής πληροφορίας, τα χαρακτηριστικά και η δομή τους καθώς και πραγματικές εφαρμογές τους. / The digital season for many European archives, libraries and museums is not any more an option, but a reality. Converting the cultural information into bits and bytes opens new horizons in attracting traditional and new audience and permits access to cultural resources in ways inconceivable a few decades before. Also, recently the need for efficient and easy access to geographical information has been increased dramatically due to the increased number of applications which use spatial data, to the need of free access to information and to technological evolution which has imposed a new philosophy and new possibilities to access and association of data. In order to serve efficiently these needs, an interaction among different systems, data and processes is required known as interoperability. The interoperability, as far as access to information and carrying information is concerned, is materialized through standardisation. There are three types of standardisation: of the structure, of the meaning (content, representation, semantics) and of the way the information is carried (format) according to a set of rules which compose what we call standard. It is expected that in the next few years a larger number of users are going to use and adopt standards while at the same time the configuration and establishment of a fixed way of exchanging data is the only one to secure loss of investments of already produced data and to save thousands of man-hours that are now wasted for configuring programs per case for facing urgent needs. The present paper is focussed on the various standards of the meaning of the information. We only concern about cultural and geographical information. It presents the most popular standards of metadata of cultural and geographical information as well as real applications that use them.

This thesis contributes to the ongoing debate on the future of smart ticketing in the United Kingdom, and in particular the role of ITSO in that future. Through evaluation of commentary from prominent elite personnel connected with the transport industry and from local and national government departments, this thesis identifies the environment in which smart ticketing is intended to operate, the means by which that is achieved and the significance of the outcomes. Key themes which emerged from the research were Partnership Working and Governance, the Customer Proposition and the ITSO Question, which focused on the operationalisation of smart ticketing in the bus industry. In terms of the evaluation of the outcomes of ITSO, conclusions are reached as to the success ITSO has achieved in terms of the national concessionary schemes as well as the limited success it has achieved in relation to commercial interoperable ticketing in a deregulated environment which has been revealed to work against the concept of interoperability.