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Abstract
Medical information systems are characterized by the existence of
various distributed and heterogeneous software systems, each of them
specialized for certain domains. In this environment, interoperation
between systems is crucial since, in general, large amounts of
data such as multimedia objects have to be transferred. Mostly, this is
achieved by some communication server which supports bilateral data
transfer. However, communication servers do
neither allow to have a global view on dependencies between all systems
nor do they provide for any transactional execution guarantees such as
failure handling and/or alternative executions that include more than
two systems. This, in turn, can be solved by encompassing global
dependencies into processes and by exploiting systems that execute
processes under transactional control. But these systems are usually
not made for the support of data-intensive applications. Hence, a
combination of transactional process support and communication servers
is required such that the advantages of both systems can be brought together.
In this paper, we present an approach to support data-intensive
processes for which transactional execution guarantees are provided.
We have implemented a prototype system based on the transactional
process management system Wise, developed at ETH, and the
commercial communication server Cloverleaf. By plugging Cloverleaf as a
dedicated component to the Wise system, we are able to execute
transactional processes in medical information systems while, at the same time,
supporting the standard communication server functionality for data
transfer purposes.
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