Comment submitted by David R. Webber, Technology Project Lead, Health Resources and Services Administration, NIH and Chair, Oasis Cam TC

Information technology for connecting government information systems in a rapid way that can respond to dynamic needs and situations is emerging. Both the project I am involved with at NIH and also work the CDC/PHIN has directed over the past two years is aimed at providing open infrastructure components that can be freely distributed as needs dictate to establish trusted connections across government and NGOs. The vision is utilizing open public specifications implemented as open source technology. Not surprisingly the Chinese Government has also been highly proactive in this arena ? targetting not just emergency application needs but commercial interaction with Walmart, Intel, HP and other strategic market partners. The Chinese have funded the development and certification of the key messaging component. We have taken that and enhanced it here at NIH ? added additional components to manage trusted partner certification and automated transaction handling for the business messages, including healthcare syntaxes. The foundation for this approach is open internationally supported software specifications and standards ? including ISO, OASIS, W3C and UN/CEFACT. This combination then provides the means for construction of trusted client deployments that can be simply plugged into downstream systems. Some use cases would include: ? Bringing emergency supply logistics to a hospital in a crisis zone who lost access to their normal systems. ? Linking emergency reporting from healthcare providers to central crisis management systems (CDC use case). ? Secure regulatory reporting from strategic service providers ? such as telecommunications, power, etc. ? Intra-agency collaboration and secure information exchange. The key is the ability to rapidly add certified partners via central registry services without needing complex sign-up procedures that take days or weeks to complete. Combined with this is dynamic role and context based configurable information exchange formats using XML that can be rapidly tailored without requiring weeks or months of programming. This whole problem set has been examined by the government XMLWG for more than two years now and more recently the SICoP work has provided strong focus. The attached presentation to the SICoP meeting at NSF in January, 2006 at the link below here provides more information on the approach that NIH is developing. Strategic Leadership in SOA: Department of Navy, E-grants (30LU) NIH Web Services Discovery System and B2B Exchange (30 David RR Webber, NIH ? eReceipts ? Technology Project Lead and Chair OASIS CAM TC. SICoP / NSF link: http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl? ExpeditionWorkshop/AdvancingCredibleCommitments_AgileSensing_Bootstrappin gServiceOrientedArchitecture_2006_01_24