Today was the last day of Open Repository 2008. I chose to attend the Fedora User Group session today, which centred around users describing real projects they undertake with Fedora. Right up my alley.
Out of the three presentation, I want to highlight the last one. Marcos Santoz, a research assistant from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, talked about project TAS3. TAS3 stands for "Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services". What an ominous title !!! The team used Fedora to build a system with the following goals :
- manage lifelong generated personal information for individuals in the employability and e-Health sector.
- support "sticky policies" and "break the glass" (I explain this later with an example)
- support lots of different data standards (see their website for details).
Pretty abstract, right ? It was for me, until Marcos talked us through two used cases. Here's number one. A doctor treats a severely wounded patient who just arrived in the emergency theatre. The doctor needs the patient's medical record. She accesses the patient record repository, and learns that she does not have the access privileges to the patient's medical history ("sticky policies"). She then tries to access the record a second time, which trigger an audit trail review, which, if successful, clears our doctor for access ("break the glass").
The second used case was less of a life and death scenario. An graduate applies for a position at a company. Our graduates learning records are being maintained via IMS-LIP, yet our hiring manager's system works only on HR-XML. Our graduate wants to grant access to his learning records to the hiring manager. TAS3 will take care of the format and protocol mediation, thus allowing the hiring manager to look at our graduates data without exiting his environment.
That was it. My OR2008 is over. What a blast, I learned just enough to appreciate what I don't know. What I do know, is that whatever tough problems are being solved here, Honeycomb and Sun's technology line-up is a perfect platform for open repositories.
It's good-bye Southampton from me. See you at OR2009 in Atlanta, Georgia.