A Collaborative Semantic Annotation System in Health: Towards a SOA Design for Knowledge Sharing in Ambient Intelligence

Abstract

People nowadays spend more and more time performing collaborative tasks at anywhere and anytime. Specifically, professionals want to collaborate with each other by using advanced technologies for sharing knowledge in order to improve/automatize business processes. Semantic web technologies offer multiple benefits such as data integration across sources and automation enablers. The conversion of the widespread Content Management Systems into its semantic equivalent is a relevant step, as this enables the benefits of the semantic web to be extended. The FLERSA annotation tool makes it possible. In particular, it converts the Joomla! CMS into its semantic equivalent. However, this tool is highly coupled with that specific Joomla! platform. Furthermore, ambient intelligent (AmI) environments can be seen as a natural way to address complex interactions between users and their environment, which could be transparently supported through distributed information systems. However, to build distributed information systems for AmI environments it is necessary to make important design decisions and apply techniques at system/software architecture level. In this paper, a SOA-based design solution consisting of two services and an underlying middleware is combined with the FLERSA tool. It allows end-users to collaborate independently of technical details and specific context conditions and in a distributed, decentralized way.