Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 2.
Platform conceptualization
As showed, pre-existing VOs join the common cloud ecosystem enabled by the
platform. Each VO provides a set of resources. These resources can be public
(available in the ecosystem for any other VO), protected (available just for authorized
actors) or private (available only inside of owner VO or under payment). The
platform is able to manage any kind of resource regardless by the infrastructures on
which they are deployed. This interoperable layer is assured by the semantic
representation of resource.
2.1
A Practical Use Case: Health Systems Interconnection
Several medical systems (e.g. ORION and IANUS) are currently coexisting in Spain
providing similar data and services. They are solutions developed in different times in
order to meet different requirements and needs from different end-users (e.g.
hospitals) that are progressively converging.
Integrated services as well as the need of a stronger level of collaboration require a
high level of interoperability. This requirement is completely missed in current
systems that are designed to work according to stand-alone behaviors.
The interoperability among health systems is normally solved through ad-hoc
solutions (e.g. an interoperable layer between ORION and IANUS). This class of
solution is expensive and has several limitations in terms of flexibility because it does
not solve a generic problem but just a concrete/local problem. Details about will be
provided in the section 3.1.
The health systems interconnection is probably an extreme case from several
points of view. But it is a significant example of the impact that virtual (or real)
