Cross-domain information and service interoperability

The growing trends towards integrating legacy applications with new systems in a network-centric environment has introduced yet another level of complexity beyond those we witnessed in development of large monolithic systems. In this context, most research challenges focus on interoperability within the same domain. However, provision of cross-domain interoperability among collaborating domains is a new challenge that needs more attention from the research community. Such interoperability requires data and service extraction to obtain common subsets of information and services in collaborating domains, e.g., healthcare and insurance. The first step in achieving such a large interoperability is to follow similar development processes for collaborating domains, which provides homogeneity in their architectures. The second step would be to provide intra-domain and inter-domain semantic interoperability through proprietary and shared ontology systems. In this paper, we address the above challenges through description of a framework that is based on core information standards and terminology systems and employs a guideline to achieve service interoperability among systems of the collaborating domains. A real-world case study of cross-domain interoperability among two domains healthcare and insurance is presented.