XML and Data Integration International Health Systems owns and operates dozens o

Question

XML and Data Integration
International Health Systems owns and operates dozens of health care clinics in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The U.S. federal government has recently passed legislation known as "meaningful use" which is intended to incentivize health care providers to adopt electronic health record systems. One of the primary objectives for offering these financial incentives is the desire to collect and store "big data" that can be shared and integrated to support health outcomes research. You have been hired to advise International Health Systems as to the options available to them for maximizing the organizational benefit to the corporation as well as for meeting the meaningful use regulations and qualifying for the financial incentives associated with those regulations. Discuss the following topics:

Evaluate the role that structures and data formats play in the capacity for an organization to integrate data for analytics.
Explore the potential for use of data formats such as XML to reduce dependence on a particular DBMS or application.
Explore the tools and technologies available to support secure integration of systems within a global organization.

Explanation / Answer

1. Evaluate the role that structures and data formats play in the capacity for an organization to integrate data for analytics.
Answer
------------
As mentioned the in the below statment in actual question or requirment says everything
"One of the primary objectives for offering these financial incentives is the desire to collect and store "big data" that can be shared and integrated to support health outcomes research"
To understand the overall concept we need to understand the following questions
What is BigData ?
1. Big Data : Data in huge volumn or having exponital growth in nature is called Big Data. i.e.
data is increased day by day like every day more than 1000 TB of data is being generated like facbook, twitters and youtube etc. so we have normally three type of
data called Structured, Semi-Structured or Un-Structured data.
Structred data that have predefined length of data like number,string etc. we can easily store into relational database in table format.
Semi Structured data that have some Structured but it's length is not fixed like csv, xml etc. CSV or XML can have any number of columns or tag. XML can have any number of child nodes.
Unstructred Data that not have predifned strucure. It can be any thing like facbook comments which can be image, normal text, video etc.

2. Why we are concering about data format ?
For anaysisng the data, we need always structure data so that our program can process it and produce the output for the anysist and anysist can analyze it and generate the business.
structure data easliy can be stored in relational database but semi-structured or un-structured data we cannot store it into relational database.
so to analyze the unstructured data , we always need a powerfull processing engine which can process or convert the unstructure data into structure data and we always need strong machenisim to store the unstructured data. so today we have serval nosql database ( mongo db, hive etc )and file systems ( hadoop ) avialable which can deal with un-structured data fastly.
but here the point is we need always data in correct format or human readable format and to make unstrucutre data into human readable format, we always process the data so here format
should be well defined manner in such a way so that every time whenever we need it we don't need to process it. it saves processign efforts.
3. Why we are concering about system integration ?
Now for Big Organization like facebook,twitter,youtube,big corporate Banks, goverment bodies they all have different sources for collecting data.
There is no one single source for data collection ans storing and processing so it means there would be some machenism for integrate the serval data sources or system for profcessing the data on same order.
so every organization thinks in the ways where they can easily access the data whenever it is needed or required and process it or genrate some meaning full data.


2. Explore the potential for use of data formats such as XML to reduce dependence on a particular DBMS or application.
XML is eXtensible Markup Language which we have discussed above that xml is semi-structure data having no predefined or fixed information but very usefull content format ( child and parent relation-ship tags ) which can be used for presentation like Reports and Graphs as well as for storing the data into database.
XML content can directly saved into database and there are almost every presenatation tool understand the XML and display the XML data into readable format. Serval Reporting and data anaysis tool directly use the XML to generate the report and graphs and the same reports and graphs can directly store into database so no conversion is required to deal with it.
It reduce the processing efforts for any organization if they support XML data format. Now days there is one another format called JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) which is more lighter than XML and very popular data format technique is being used widely.
JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format. Several scripting and programming language easily understand the data in JSON format and store directly into database. JSON format also used for data presentation like Report and Graphs.
sample XML and JSON data format
Sample XML
------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<employee>
<firstname>Tove</firstname>
<lastname>Jani</lastname>
<address>NewYork</address>
<salary>10000</salary>
</employee>
Sample JSON
----------------
{ "name":"John", "age":31, "city":"New York" };

Explore the tools and technologies available to support secure integration of systems within a global organization.

It better to understand one scenario instead of understanding tools and technologies directly.

Let us suppose you are e-commerce company like Amazon and your oraganization is growing fast as your company' end user strength ( counts ) is increasing day by
day with good purchesing power.

Now at technical side, you have already implemented application where user can purchase the items and order it. you have well defined machenisim to deliver it . the only thing which
is not working in well manner is payment system beacuase every day there is altogether new type of payment method is introduced and that payment mode to be supported for your application.

so at higher management level, board decided to buy a third party billing service instead of developing new payment methods in your applciation. so for that as per the solution user can purchase products online but for billing or payment of that products he request to another company URL ( third party service ) on same portal which is integrated with your web portal and that URL will take you through different forms and authunicatication process. once payment done the control will get back to again the same company's web portal with success status and now your web portal will ask for feedback. so in whole porcess only the billing part is done through other system and rest of the work is done by oraganization itself.

so here we noticed that there is one another system ( billing service which is managed by different company ) coming into the picture and integrated with exisitng e-commerce portal
but user is not aware from this. so for integration , there are some agreed standarnds has to be followed so that integration can be easily done without any failure.

Technologies : SOA ( Service Oriented architectures ) and Microservice based architecture

To integrate one sysytem to another , one applciation should be developed using above given technologies. by doing this integration efforts will becomes reduce.

Now we will understand, what is SOA and Micorservice based architecture. These standards say you application internal modules should not be tightly coupled.
It should be loosly coupled so that failure of one module will not impact the functionaling of another module and one module will be integrating with another using some
standard content negotiation ( SOAP, HTTP, HTTPS etc ) rules and data formats ( XML, JSON etc. )

Tools : There are serval tools avaible in market which provides speicifc services like

Microsoft BizTalk 2016 Server
MuleSoft
TIBCO BusinessWorks

These tools provide processing high volumes of real-time transactions where within one second, hundread and thousands of request reach at system and acknowledged.

other than above there are so many companies which provides payment or billing solution which we can integrate with our application like Zoho subscription, EBizcharge, chargify, PaySimple etc.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse X
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.