Exhibits, Demos & Posters
Metamodel-based Development of WSRF-Compliant SOA for Collaborative Cancer Research
Authors
- Tianyi Zang, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford
- Radu Calinescu, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford
- Steve Harris, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford
- Andrew Tsui, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford
- Charles Crichton, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford
- Marta Kwiatkowska, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford
- Jeremy Gibbons, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford
- Jim Davies, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford
- James Brenton, Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge
- Carlos Caldas, Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge
Abstract
The CancerGrid consortium is developing open-standards cancer informatics to address the challenges posed by modern cancer clinical trials. Their costly-to-build information systems are often composed of incompatible variants of the same modules, and record data in ways that prevent any meaningful result analysis across similar projects. The information technology required to enable this kind of large-scale, collaborative science will need to support easy and rapid development and deployment of reliable and flexible software systems that enable syntactic, semantic and computational interoperability.
This poster presents a framework for the metamodel-based generation of Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) compliant Service–Oriented Architecture (SOA) for collaborative cancer research. A generic SOA model is built based on a combination of the standard domain metamodel and metadata, and the WSRF standards. This model is then employed to automate the generation of the trial management systems used in cancer clinical trials. The integration of the WSRF standards with the standard domain metamodel enables the generated systems to support syntactic, semantic, and computational interoperability that is essential for collaborative cancer research. Automating the model-driven system generation not only speeds up its development, but also enforces its conformance to these standards. The SOA model and generated system are currently being evaluated for use in early-phase clinical trials. Although primarily targeted at cancer research, our approach can be readily applied to other application scenarios and domains for which a similar metamodel and metadata are available. Moreover, the techniques used to generate WSRF Web services are directly applicable to other WSRF–based applications.
