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where ≈*(
m
) denotes the transitive closure over
≈(
m
).
In order to avoid contradictions, we demand
that
on the idea or reactive tuple spaces (Cabri,
Loeonardi, & Zambonelli, 1998).
application Case study
(
)
Health care is an agile environment with increasing
demand to provide the right services at the right time
with minimal user input. Health care professionals
require efficient access to personalised Electronic
Medical Records (EMRs) composed on-the-fly.
At the outset, the idea of a digital “dashboard” for
patient treatment cases sounds appealing because
it enables users to customise the contents of their
portal. However, offering a practical dashboard
draws closer significant challenges to the average
user, a clinician in our case, and to the designer of
portal applications.
Together with domain experts, we have collab-
oratively tested our approach with a case study
from the vision health care field. Eye diseases and
disorders vary from cases that require simple treat-
ment with eye drops and patches to sophisticated
surgeries. An example of a disease that requires
a surgery is a cataract, which is a clouding of the
eye's lens that causes loss of vision (National Eye
Institute, 2006).
The large variety of diseases combined with
individual specialisations of physicians impedes
the development of a single, one-size-fits-all EMR
application. Rather, a portal application that provides
physicians with the ability to compose, organise,
and link information based on “typical cases”
appears more appropriate and powerful.
We will focus on one of these treatment cases,
cataract, and illustrate our approach to customise
a portal based on the underlying PDO. An ophthal-
mologist might go through the following scenario
when dealing with a new patient assessed with a
cataract. First, the ophthalmologist performs an
assessment of the patient's case. At this stage, the
physician completes what is called an “Assessment
Report,” where the physician records the results
of a few eye exams. For the purposes of simplicity
we will refer to two tests: (a) a Corrected Vision
∀ ∈•
k
(
m
) :
∃ ∀
c
:
( , ,
l e a
)
∈
k
:
c
isa
e
∨
e
isa c
∧
c
has
a
, where “isa” and “has” are Boolean predicates;
“isa” is true if and only if its first argument is a sub-
concept of its second argument in the PDO; “has”
is true if and only if its first argument is a concept
that has its second argument as a property.
Generation of Event Connections
The conventional model for connections among
WPCs is directional, as outlined in the third
section. This means that any WPC event inter-
face can function either as a source or a sink for
events of a certain type. We have argued in the
User-Driven WPC Composition: Criticism of the
Current Paradigm section that this “directional”
composition model limits the usability of portal
applications in which pages are composed in an
ad-hoc fashion. Our approach to resolving this
issue is based on two ideas:
•
Symmetric interfaces:
WPCs for ad-hoc
composition should be designed with sym-
metric event interfaces for exchanging data
with other WPCs. As shown in Figure 5, this
means that there is a sink and a source for
each event that carries application semantics.
(Obviously, we do not consider housekeeping
events such as redraw actions, etc.)
•
CIM blackboard:
Rather than connecting
WPC event interfaces directly, we connect
WPCs to a component that instantiates
the CIM discussed earlier. This component
functions as a “blackboard” for exchanging
semantic information among the WPCs on a
portal page. WPCs can post semantic data to
the CIM blackboard as well as subscribe to
changes to this data. This approach is based
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