An Experience of using SoaML for Modeling a Service-Oriented

Architecture for Health Information Systems

Fernanda G. Silva

, Jislane S. S. de Menezes

, Josimar de S. Lima

, Joyce M. S. Franc¸a

Rog´erio P. C. do Nascimento

and Michel S. Soares

Department of Computing, Federal University of Sergipe, S˜ao Crist´ov˜ao, Brazil

Faculty of Computing, Federal University of Uberlˆandia, Brazil

Keywords:

Service Oriented Architecture, SoaML, Health Information Systems.

Abstract:

Service-oriented applications have been modeled with different modeling languages and diagrams, which

suggests a lack of standardization. Although UML concepts for modeling SOA can be regarded as a good

starting point, it is not an entirely feasible approach, as UML has not been proposed with the purpose of

modeling services and SOA applications. Besides, the proper concept of service is absent in UML. SoaML

is a UML proﬁle for the speciﬁcation and design of services within a service-oriented architecture. One of

the advantages of using SoaML to model interoperability between systems in health care is that it is possible

to model the consumers and service providers. This would be quite difﬁcult to achieve using UML only.

Therefore, the main contribution of this work is to manipulate a relatively new modeling language to real

operational problems related to the integration of health systems.

1 INTRODUCTION

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm

to implement loosely-coupled, platform-independent

distributed software systems using communicat-

ing services. SOA has been applied success-

fully in many domains, including ﬁnancial systems

(King et al., 2010), healthcare information systems

(Khoshkbarforoushha et al., 2010), (Monsieur et al.,

2012), research-oriented applications in engineering

(Vescoukis and Dulamis, 2011), academic software

applications (Baghdadi and Al-Bulushi, 2013), and

for varied activities such as refactoring legacy sys-

tems (Khadka et al., 2011), integration of systems and

for developing new software systems (Alonso et al.,

2010). Therefore, it is safe to assume that SOA has

been widely applied in projects both in academia and

industry.

SOA applications have been modeled with differ-

ent modeling languages and diagrams, which sug-

gests a lack of standardization in this area. For

instance, dataﬂows are applied in (Monsieur et al.,

2012) and Flowcharts are applied in (Wu et al.,

2009). Regarding UML, Activity diagrams are used

in (Granell et al., 2010), Sequence diagrams in

(EL Yamany et al., ) and (Kannan et al., 2011). The

work presented in (Perepletchikov and Ryan, 2011)

uses Class, Collaboration and Sequence diagrams all

together.

Existing models for describing system architec-

tures are insufﬁcient to describe SOA in a precise and

standardized way. Although UML concepts for mod-

eling SOA can be regarded as a good starting point, it

is not an entirely feasible approach (Stojanovic et al.,

2004). UML has not been proposed with the purpose

of modeling services and SOA applications, and is

considered too general for the purpose of describing

SOA (Todoran et al., 2011). Besides, the proper con-

cept of service is absent in UML.

SoaML (OMG, 2012) is a UML proﬁle for the

speciﬁcation and design of services within a service-

oriented architecture. SoaML extends UML with six

main areas: participants, service interfaces, service

contracts, services architectures, service data and ca-

pabilities. Although SoaML has already been applied

to some cases (Gebhart et al., 2010) (Elvesæter et al.,

2010) (Hu et al., 2014), the language has hardly been

mentioned in the literature (this is a result of a sys-

tematic literature review performed by the authors).

Reasons for this are not yet clear, but one possibility

can be the novelty of the language, ofﬁcially released

on March 2012. Another one is because UML is

well-known in academia and software industry, which

makes it a suitable choice for most authors.

322

G. Silva F., S. S. de Menezes J., de S. Lima J., M. S. França J., P. C. do Nascimento R. and S. Soares M..

An Experience of using SoaML for Modeling a Service-Oriented Architecture for Health Information Systems.

DOI: 10.5220/0005464403220327

In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2015), pages 322-327

ISBN: 978-989-758-098-7

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

This paper describes an attempt to use SoaML in

a speciﬁc domain, health information systems, with

the purpose of modeling a real problem of system in-

teroperability. SoaML was applied in a real case, in

which services of some information systems are mod-

eled. After a brief introduction to SoaML in Section

2, we present the description of the Health Informa-

tion Systems to be modeled (Section 3), the descrip-

tion of the provided services in Section 4, the case

study and the conclusions in the last two sections.

2 INTRODUCTION TO SOAML

UML (OMG-UML, 2011) alone does not perfectly

match the needs of service-oriented projects (Todoran

et al., 2011). For this reason, in 2009, OMG pro-

posed SoaML (Service Oriented Architecture Model-

ing Language), a UML proﬁle speciﬁcally targeted to

SOA systems. SoaML speciﬁcation provides a meta-

model and a UML proﬁle for the speciﬁcation and

design of services within a Service-Oriented Archi-

tecture (Object Management Group (OMG), 2012).

Therefore, SoaML represents SOA artifacts using

UML as a core-modeling standard (Casanave, 2009).

SoaML addresses the following topics: identi-

ﬁcation of services and their dependencies; speci-

ﬁcation of services, protocols and information ex-

changed; deﬁnition of communication between ser-

vice consumers and providers, deﬁnition of policy for

consumers and providers. Thus, it is possible to per-

form an entire analysis of service-oriented architec-

ture, showing how the services and service partici-

pants work together to provide business value.

Support of SoaML for SOA design is important

for two reasons (Mohammadi and Mukhtar, 2013):

service modeling as a ﬁrst step is essential for devel-

oping successful SOA systems regardless of imple-

mentation details, and SOA modeling helps to better

understand and communicate between business users

and IT experts. SoaML introduces ﬁve types of di-

agrams: Service Interface Diagram, Service Partic-

ipant Diagram, Service Contract Diagram, Services

Architecture Diagram and Service Categorization Di-

agram. A brief description of each of these diagrams

is presented as follows (Object Management Group

(OMG), 2012).

Service Interface Diagram: Such as a UML in-

terface, a Service Interface Diagram deﬁnes or spec-

iﬁes the service and can be the type of a service

port. This diagram has the additional feature of be-

ing able to specify a bi-directional service with a pro-

tocol. Therefore, both providers and consumers have

responsibilities to invoke and respond to operations,

send and receive messages or events.

Service Participant Diagram: this diagram con-

tains the participants to collaborations based on ser-

vices. They are characterized by services and ports,

which are similar to interfaces from UML Compo-

nents.

Service Contract Diagram: this diagram repre-

sents an extension of the UML Collaboration dia-

gram which shows the relationship between partici-

pant roles. Consumers or providers of services are

materialized through service channels.

Services Architecture Diagram: diagram to model

global collaboration, based on the use of service con-

tracts, and connects all suppliers and consumers.

Service Categorization Diagram: SoaML intro-

duces a generic mechanism for UML elements with

categories and values to describe information about

these elements. Categories can be organized into a

hierarchy of named catalogs. The same element can

be classiﬁed for many categories, and the same cate-

gory can be applied to various elements. This diagram

is intended to be a very ﬂexible and dynamic mech-

anism to arrange the various elements in orthogonal

hierarchies.

3 DESCRIPTION OF THE

HEALTH INFORMATION

SYSTEMS

Information Systems in the Health Ministry in Brazil

have been actively re-engineered, as it is well-

understood that high qualiﬁcation of information

management is of fundamental importance to provide

quality services for citizens. An Electronic Health In-

formation System (e-HIS) for basic services (e-HIS

BS) is an strategy to re-structure basic health services

nationwide. This e-HIS BS has as purpose to of-

fer computer-based tools to improve management for

basic health units and allow interoperability between

health information systems.

e-HIS BS has as purpose to follow actions and

results from activities performed by teams from the

Family Health Program (FHP). By using e-HIS BS,

anyone can have access to families information, in-

dividual health situation, general house and sanita-

tion conditions, and about each health professional

team. All generated data from e-HIS BS will feed

another system, the Information System for Basic

Health (ISBH), which main characteristic is to struc-

ture individual information with the purpose to im-

prove the possibilities of care actions by the health

teams, as well as creating traces of health actions in

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Figure 1: e-HIS Architecture.

Figure 2: e-HIS Basic Health Attention Architecture.

all national territory.

e-HIS BS has as assumptions: detailed individual

information for each citizen, allowing to register each

health occurrence and each treatment by a health pro-

fessional; integration of information systems dealing

with basic health services; production of dynamic re-

ports; reduction of inefﬁcient tasks and activities, in-

cluding registering data in a computer tool; and ﬁ-

nally, using information for better management and

health care.

e-HIS BS presents two main modules: Simpliﬁed

Data Collection (SDC) and Electronic Health Record

(EHR). Module SDC allows integrated and simpliﬁed

registering by using a variety of ﬁles, including, for

instance, house situation, general information about

the citizen, odontological situation, historical health

procedures, and information about home visiting by

a health professional. All these collected information

will be stored into the ISBH. SDC module uses seven

ﬁles for data registration, divided into two blocks, as

depicted in Fig. 1.

Module Basic Attention Register (BAR) is an ex-

tension of National Health Register (HNR). This BAR

module helps health teams to register health, social

and economic characteristics for a given population.

NHR is a national information system which allows

identiﬁcation of users in all activities and services by

means of a unique number for each citizen. In ad-

dition, NHR allows one to identify each professional

and health organization responsible for a given treat-

ment.

e-HIS EHR was proposed to help health teams lo-

cated in small health organizations which fully use or

even partially use computer tools. Among other func-

tions, e-HIS EHR provides management of patients,

organizes professionals’ agenda, and register health

activities.

One important functionality implemented in the

management module of e-HIS EHR is to import

data from National Record of Health Organizations

(NRHO), an ofﬁcial database with information from

all health organizations in the country, both private

and public. NRHO has as main functionalities to

record health organizations and existing infrastruc-

ture, individual professionals and teams, and many

kinds of reports.

Data is inserted into the NRHO system through

SNRHO software applications. NRHO is also used

as a basis to centralize information from many other

health information systems, including Outpatient In-

formation System (OIS), Hospital Information Sys-

tem (HIS), Basic Attention Health Information Sys-

tem (BAHIS), and Local Information System (LIS).

All these systems have some participation in the na-

tional health process, as depicted in Fig. 2.

As can be observed in Fig. 2, there are still pa-

per ﬁles being used by Basic Health Units (BHU). Pa-

per forms, containing the same information presented

in e-HIS SDC, are printed and manually ﬁlled, every

day, and delivered to a computer operator, who will

insert data into e-HIS SDC. By the end of the day,

before he/she ﬁnishes all inserted data, the computer

operator has to verify if there is any alteration in data

present in NRHO. If the operator ﬁnds any change in

data, he/she has to download the new ﬁle from the

NRHO and update databases of e-HIS EHR and e-

HIS SDC systems. This is a manual operation. Af-

ter the update, e-HIS SDC becomes available again

to insert all paper ﬁles generated in that day. This

operation is performed by a computer operator, who

saves all data into a memory stick device, and deliv-

ers it to the municipality health secretary. Then, all

information is collected to be transmitted to the na-

tional database, at the federal ministry health depart-

ment. This process is described in Fig. 3, in which

one can observe the need to automate communication

between NHRO and e-HIS SDC, in order to avoid er-

rors and late delivers everyday.

4 DESCRIPTION OF THE

PROVIDED SERVICES

As paper ﬁles contain data to be inserted, and as this

procedure is error-prone and needs to be often up-

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Figure 3: Deﬁned process.

Figure 4: e-HIS Basic Health Attention with Services.

dated, it is clear that these data can be treated as re-

sponses to request services. Data to be treated as ser-

vices are described as follows.

Professional ID. Number of the national ID Card of

the professional who inserted the citizen/family in

NRHO. Mandatory ﬁeld.

NRHO Unit Code. Code to identify the health unit

in NRHO. Mandatory ﬁeld.

NRHO Team Code. Code to identify the health

team in NRHO. Mandatory ﬁeld.

Citizen ID. Number of the national ID Card of the

responsible for the family.

Some services were identiﬁed, as depicted in Fig.

4, considering systems NRHO and NHR as service

providers. In order to insert data from the paper ﬁles

into e-HIS BAR, services are requested from NRHO

and NHR. For the ﬁle transmission, all generated ﬁles

from each BHU need to be received. In the end, all

ﬁles are validated, processed and transmitted to the

ISBH, in the Health Ministry.

5 CASE STUDY

Proposed case study is the creation of a service-

oriented architecture using SoaML proﬁle as model-

Figure 5: Service Participant Diagram.

ing language, considering the domain and the prob-

lems presented in previous sections.

Identifying all participants is the ﬁrst task to

be performed. Five participants are candidates to

be modeled in this case study: e-HIS SDC, e-HIS

EHR, NHR, NRHO and ISBH. Initially, all inter-

dependencies between these systems were identiﬁed.

Then, existing functionalities in involved systems that

could be transformed into services were also identi-

ﬁed.

One of the man advantages of using SoaML is that

it is possible to represent the models both for the con-

sumers and the providers of services. Fig. 5 depicts

the service participant diagram in which all identiﬁed

participants are modeled, as well as their services, be-

ing it as a consumer or as a provider. Stereotype “Ser-

vice” identiﬁes which participants will provide a ser-

vice, and Stereotype “Request” means that the par-

ticipant has consumed the service provided by other

participant in the domain. Participants e-HIS SDC

and e-HIS EHR both consume and provide services.

On the other hand, participants NRHO and NHR only

provide services. ISBH only consumes created ser-

vices by other participants. SoaML has also the Ser-

vice Contract diagram, which presents, in a different

view, how each provider is related to a service con-

sumer. Fig. 7 depicts an example of the Service Con-

tract diagram. SoaML speciﬁes one service contract

diagram for each deﬁned service. In Fig. 7, one ex-

AnExperienceofusingSoaMLforModelingaService-OrientedArchitectureforHealthInformationSystems

325

Figure 6: Service Architecture Diagram.

Figure 7: Service Contract diagram.

ample of Service Contract diagram for each relation

between provider/consumer,a service contract, is cre-

ated.

Another characteristic of SoaML is its capacity

to represent a context of interaction between services

and participants, representing a set of interaction be-

tween these contexts. Fig. 6 presents the Service Ar-

chitecture diagram of the proposed domain. This dia-

gram presents interaction between all participants and

the contract services modeled in the variety of SoaML

diagrams.

6 CONCLUSIONS

This study aimed to present the use of SoaML for

modeling a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for

health information systems. By supporting SOA,

SoaML is an efﬁcient modeling language to address

interoperability between the various discussed sys-

tems. One of the advantages is realized by using

SoaML to model a domain in health care is that it

was possible to model the consumers and service

providers. This would be quite difﬁcult to achieve us-

ing UML only. Therefore, the main contribution of

this work is to manipulate a relatively new modeling

language to real operational problems related to the

integration of health systems.

As for future work, the development of a simula-

tor that implements the integration between systems

through the use of web services is suggested. For this

purpose, one can use the Java programming language

and Apache Thrift framework.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the Brazilian research

agencies CNPq (grant 445500/2014-0) and CAPES/

FAPITEC (grant AUXPE 0517/2014) for supporting

this work.

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