Application Integration and Semantic Integration in Electronic Prescription Systems

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a strategic activity and a technology set that can enable an organization to run much more efficiently, and thus provide a significant competitive advantage. Today, in the emergence of many new technologies based on Web services, there are still more approaches for EAI each approach having its limitations and opportunities. We have analyzed the limitations and opportunities of database-oriented, process-oriented, service-oriented and portal-oriented integration strategies from electronic prescription systems’ point of view. It has turned out that we cannot satisfy all the requirements by any of these strategies but rather we have to develop the electronic prescription system which supports various strategies. We have also developed ontologies for semantic integration. Semantic integration has been a long-time challenge for the database community. However, by semantic integration we refer to the process of analyzing the relationships of data (i.e., their semantics) stored at communicating systems, and then using this semantics to automate the communication between computer systems. Our reason for semantic integration is the observations that within medication terms are not used in a consistent way, which have caused many serious errors in medication. In semantic integration we have used XML-based ontology languages RFD, RDF Schema and OWL.