Approach to Design
The major goal that guided the present design specification process was to establish a coarse-grained view of the system from the gathered users’ requirements. This exercise was useful to identify major software layers, inner constituents and corresponding interfaces, while helping in better splitting the work and responsibilities among collaborators.
Similarly to the Service Oriented Modelling and Architecture (SOMA) (Arsanjani, 2004) process, coworkers aimed at identifying features and gradually grouping them into logical layers for future implementation. Thus, a meet-in-the-middle approach was adopted which reconciled requirements expressed by end-users with the bottom-up grid deployments of existing IT assets. The result of this work is here presented using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) (MacKenzie, et al, 2006), as the focal meeting point and federating concept.
In order to give clarity to this manuscript, only a relevant subset of the requirements and design objectives is introduced, with the aim of focussing on the gridification related aspects. The following section therefore briefly presents the service orientation and associated advantages, while progressively describing the retained system architecture, gridification approach and positioning of author’s contribution. It is important to note that the latter builds upon former contribution and experiences in the area of gridification (Manset, Pourraz, Tsymbal, Revillard, Skaburskas, McClatchey, et al, in press) and e-health platform developments (McClatchey, Manest & Solomonides, 2006).