Metamodel-driven SOA for collaborative e-science application

摘要

The CancerGrid consortium is developing open-standards cancer informatics to address the challenges posed by the e-Science application of modern cancer clinical trials. This paper presents a framework for the metamodel-driven development of interoperable Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for collaborative cancer research. A generic SOA model is built based on a combination of the semantics of standard domain metamodel and metadata, and the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) standards. This model is then employed to automate the generation of the trial management systems used in collaborative cancer clinical trials. The integration of the Web services standards with the standard domain metamodel enables the generated systems to support syntactic, semantic and computational interoperability that is essential for collaborative e-Science application. 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 collaborative clinical trials. Our approach is readily applicable to the e-Science applications of other areas for which a similar information model is available.