Table 2 Semantic concerns

Conceptualization conflict

Communicating applications have incompatible representation of the same concept. Examples include how to describe an address, a person, a document.

IHE integration profiles define common concepts. In our system, concepts central to sharing documents are validated by NIST registry while those specific to sharing images are validated by our system. Amongst validated concepts is the manifest that must relate to specific images; this is validated by verifying the manifest content.

Conceptual scope conflict

An important concept is not communicated by one of the peers.

Important concepts are made required in IHE profiles and their presence is validated in communication transactions.

Interpretation conflict

The message has a different meaning to the listener than it does to the speaker; in other words, the technical communication is completely successful, but the intent is not fulfilled.

In IHE profiles, expected actions are specified and our testing software validates that expected actions have been accomplished mainly in two ways: if the receiving system is required to trigger a communication, the testing software awaits this and validates the communication content; if the receiving system is required to change its internal state, the testing software triggers a transaction to the tested system and validates the response content. When testing an imaging document source, the testing software verifies that the images referenced in a published manifest are available by issuing WADO transactions to the image archive. Likewise, when testing an imaging document consumer, the testing software awaits for image query from the tested system to ensure that the received manifest has been successfully decoded and interpreted.

Reference conflict

The communicating applications use different systems of reference for identical concepts. Examples include how to reference an imaging procedure, whether this is done with the accession number or the procedure id.

The testing software validates the structure used to reference images inside a manifest, as well as the consistent identification of the manifest i.e. the use of the manifest UID to identify the document inside the ebXML message.