Integrating medical applications in an open architecture through generic and reusable components

Allowing exchange of information and cooperation among network-wide distributed and heterogeneous applications is a major need of current health care information systems. It forces the development of open and modular integration architectures. Major issues in the development include defining a flexible and robust federation model, developing interaction and communication facilities as well as the mechanism insuring semantic interoperability. We developed generic and reusable software components to ease the construction of any integration platform. The Pilot and the Mediator Service components facilitate the execution of services and the meaningful transformation of information. They have been tested in the context of the SynEx European project to construct a multi-agents based integration architecture. The possibility of such architectures to take into account the issue of semantic interoperability is further discussed.