It is evident that a patient empowerment approach based on self-management ICT tools is useful and accepted by patients and physicians. Further, there are clear indications that ICT frameworks such as the one presented in this paper support patients in behavioral changes and in better disease management. Finally, it was realized that self-management solutions should be built around the objective not only to educate and guide patients in disease self-management, but also to assist them in exploring the decision space and to provide insight and explanations about the impact of their own values on the decision.

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Today, the travel information services are dominantly provided by Global Distribution Systems (GDS). The Global Distribution Systems provide access to real time availability and price information for flights, hotels and car rental companies. However GDSs have legacy architectures with private networks, specialized hardware, limited speed and search capabilities. Furthermore, being legacy systems, it is very difficult to interoperate them with other systems and data sources. For these reasons, Web service technology is an ideal fit for travel information systems. However to be able to exploit Web services to their full potential, it is necessary to introduce semantics. Without describing the semantics of Web services we are looking for, it is difficult to find them in an automated way and if we cannot describe the service we have, the probability that people will find it in an automated way is low. Furthermore, to make the semantics machine processable and interoperable, we need to describe domain knowledge through standard ontology languages. In this paper, we describe how to deploy semantically enriched travel Web services and how to exploit semantics through Web service registries. We also address the need to use the semantics in discovering both Web services and Web service registries through peer-to-peer technology.

Using archetypes is a promising approach in providing semantic interoperability among healthcare systems. To realize archetype based interoperability, the healthcare systems need to discover the existing archetypes based on their semantics; annotate their archetypes with ontologies; compose templates from archetypes and retrieve corresponding data from the underlying medical information systems.In this paper, we describe how ebXML Registry semantic constructs can be used for annotating, storing, discovering and retrieving archetypes. For semantic annotation of archetypes, we present an example archetype metadata ontology and describe the techniques to access archetype semantics through ebXML query facilities. We present a GUI query facility and describe how the stored procedures we introduce, move the semantic support beyond what is currently available in ebXML registries.We also address how archetype data can be retrieved from clinical information systems by using ebXML Web services. A comparison of Web service technology with ebXML messaging system is provided to justify the reasons for using Web services.

Abstract. In this paper, we address how ebXML registry semantics support can be further enhanced to make it OWL aware. There are basically three ways of achieving this: The first one is mapping OWL constructs to ebXML registry information model constructs without modifying the registry architecture and implementation. In this way, the semantic explicitly stored in the registry can be retrieved through querying; yet, the application program must contain additional code to process this semantics. The second approach is additionally providing predefined stored procedures in the registry for processing the OWL constructs. We believe that this approach is quite powerful to associate semantics with registry objects: it becomes possible to retrieve knowledge through queries and the enhancements to the registry are generic. The capabilities provided move the semantics support beyond what is currently available in ebXML registries and it does so by using a standard ontology language. The third approach is changing the ebXML registry to support OWL with full reasoning capabilities. However, this approach requires considerable changes in the registry architecture.Since our aim is to make the ebXML registry OWL aware by keeping the registry specification intact, we take the second approach. To be able to demonstrate the benefits of the enhancements, we also show how the resulting semantics can be made use of in Web service discovery and composition.This work is realized within the scope of IST-2104 SATINE project as a proposal to OASIS ebXML Semantic Content Management subcommittee which is working on possible semantic extensions to the registry.

No document standard is sufficient for all purposes because the requirements significantly differ among businesses, industries, and geopolitical regions. On the other hand, the ultimate aim of business document interoperability is to exchange business data among partners without any prior agreements related to the document syntax and semantics. Therefore, an important characteristic of a document standard is its ability to adapt to different contexts, its extensibility, and its customization. The UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS) is an important landmark in this direction. In this article, we present a survey and an analysis of some of the prominent UN/CEFACT CCTS-based electronic document standards. We describe their document design principles and discuss how they handle customization and extensibility. We address their industry relevance and the recent efforts for their harmonization and convergence. We conclude by mentioning some emerging efforts for the semantic interoperability of different document standards.

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