A Case Study on SoaML to Design an Electronic Health Record Application Considering Integration of Legacy Systems

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been widely used for development of distributed applications in many domains. In the literature, SOA applications have been modeled using a wide variety of modeling languages, many of them not tailored for modeling SOA characteristics. UML diagrams, such as Activity, Class, and Sequence diagrams are the most used ones. However, none of UML diagrams' has services as main principle. Therefore, the need to use a more appropriate language for modeling SOA applications arises. This paper describes the design of a SOA application in the health domain as a real case study. We propose a solution for an Electronic Health Record (EHR) application using SoaML as modeling language. We found that SoaML is an interesting modeling language for SOA applications given its constructs, diagrams and elements, as well as providing means to defining functional capabilities of a service, setting services consumers and providers, presenting the service information exchanged between consumer and providers and establishing policies for using and providing services.