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conditions relating to supplying the healthcare services. To achieve this aim, the new conceptual framework of CAPTAIN
is derived from the broker form used in IBHIS. The conceptual framework is based on the case study. CAPTAIN includes
a planning broker service component to provide the planning service of the integrated care plan for the end-user. A
negotiation framework is also integrated into CAPTAIN. The negotiation model developed is based on a number of
automated negotiation models from various aspects of negotiation situations; especially Web services (Hung et al., 2004),
service-oriented software (Elfatatry and Layzell, 2004). It consists of four main negotiation elements: message, protocol,
decision model and process. Therefore, the negotiation participants can negotiate in order to achieve agreements of terms
and conditions of services supplied.
Implementation
The CAPTAIN broker prototype is redesigned and rebuilt according to the new conceptual framework. The
implementation of the application is based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Web Services technologies, and runs
within the Eclipse Java EE IDE for Web Developers environment working on a Windows platform. It supports current
Web services standards, such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Description Language),
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) and XML (Extensible Markup Language). The CAPTAIN
application is a dynamic web application. All main system components of CAPTAIN, except the semantic registry, are
deployed as Web services.
Demonstration
A set of scenarios based on the use case has been developed based on an integrated care plan within the context
of health and social care. The scenarios are used to demonstrate, evaluate and review the service-oriented broker
application of CAPTAIN as the “proof of concept”.
Finding and discussion
The architecture of CAPTAIN
The architecture of CAPTAIN has been derived from IBHIS in order to accomplish the aim of this project.
According to Figure 2, its architecture composes from four main service components: planning broker (P-Broker),
information broker (I-Broker), DASs and semantic registry. The P-Broker and the I-Broker are statically-bound services
while the DASs are dynamically bound services.
