The meeting started with an Executive Overview of the UDEF
by UDEF project leader Ron Schuldt of Lockheed Martin.
There was then a discussion of a Challenge to be issued to product vendors
to provide tools that will enable enterprises to achieve Semantic Interoperability using the UDEF.
The Challenge will aim to demonstrate semantic interoperability for Electronic Health Record Data Exchange,
which is a prime example of the problem.
There are many existing data exchange standards for the medical field,
but the medical systems used today within hospitals and doctors’ offices
do not all support the same set of standards, and therefore cannot work together effectively.
The UDEF can help solve this problem, and similar problems of semantic interoperability in other fields,
such as manufacturing and e-commerce.
The UDEF Interested Parties Group will develop a set of detailed interoperability use-cases
for medical records, based on work done by Johnson & Johnson,
the Stevens Institute of Technology in the USA, and COEP in India,
with the US National Health Information Network.
Vendors will be invited to participate in use-case demonstrations
that will show how the UDEF-enabled products deliver the required semantic interoperability,
at one or more of the forthcoming quarterly conferences of The Open Group.
The discussion part of the meeting, on Thursday April 26, concluded with reviews of
UDEF-Enabled Enterprise Architecture -
the Global UDEF Registry,
enterprise metadata registries, and repositories -
and UDEF Internationalization.
On Friday, April 27 there was an in-depth training module on how to use the UDEF,
presented by Ron Schuldt.
The crucial activity for the immediate future is the UDEF Challenge.
The next steps for this are to finalize and publish the use-case descriptions,
to secure the participation of product vendors,
and to publicize the Challenge, which will include making a press release.
The next step for the UDEF itself is to complete the review
of the currently proposed set of extensions to the UDEF,
which includes UDEF tags that would be used in the Challenge,
and to publish those extensions after formal approval
by The Open Group Board of Directors.
