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(VOs). Analyzing VOs, it is evident that not all resources normally involved are suitable
for the migration to the Cloud. The level of flexibility of cloud solutions could be further
increased if the platforms are the result of the convergence between migration and
virtualization. The key idea is that resources deployed using cloud infrastructures
(migrated resources) and resources deployed according to conventional solution could be
merged in a unique virtual environment.
This paper proposes a resource-centric model for cloud infrastructure in which
virtual resources are provided with a semantic description/specification able to assure
a potential high level of interoperability among platforms as well as a set of facilities
for the integration of pre-existent or new resources. As detailed in the following
sections, semantics play a critical role in the proposed model especially considering
the fundamental lack of standardization the cloud is experimenting [4].
As any cloud model, it is potentially independent from any application domain
even if, inevitably, domain-specific semantic representations could be required in
certain contexts/applications.
A potential application domain for the model is the Spanish health system. In Spain,
the National Health System follows a decentralized model where each autonomous
community manages all the centres, services and establishments of the Community
Councils, Town Councils and any other intra-regional governments. An autonomous
community is the first-level political division of the Kingdom of Spain, established in
accordance with the current Spanish Constitution. Each autonomous community has
many hospital systems of very different natures, being independent of each other.
When a patient must go to different health centres should generally answer the
same questions in order to open his/her medical records in each of them. This
generates an overall lack of coordination regarding the interoperability between
systems, redundant data, basic services, etc.
There is a current trend, which aims to unify those different systems to autonomous
community level. At the moment, interconnection between all hospital systems is
unapproachable, being applied to European context.
With this purpose, the proposed model aims to provide interoperability through
cloud-based environments, giving support and tools for the virtualization, migration
of already existing systems formed by data, apps and/or infrastructure and creation of
new generation services, in order to make available basic and composite services to
consumers (patients, services,…) and for development and management of
customized e-health services to all users.
The core part of the paper is structured in 3 main sections: the section 2 is the
natural extension of the introduction (it provides a detailed description of approach
and scope); in the section 3 the model is deeply described; finally, in the section 4 a
brief analysis to next generation resources is provided.
2
Approach and Scope
The scope of enabling semantic resources in the cloud is the interconnection of
heterogeneous systems providing the coexistence of different kinds of heterogeneous
resources (Figure 1):
