Web Services: Using Microsoft Indigo Services as Building Blocks to Build Robust Distributed Systems

Web services are becoming the foundation for building distributed applications. Indigo is Microsoft’s unified framework for building service-oriented applications. It enables developers to build secure, reliable, transacted solutions that integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments. Indigo combines and extends the capabilities of existing distributed systems technologies to deliver a unified development experience spanning distance, topologies, hosting models, protocols, and security models.

This session of the 2005 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit explores the details of Indigo and how the Ohio State University Medical Center is using Microsoft Indigo framework and open specifications—such as WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-RM (Reliable Messaging), and WS-AtomicTransaction—to build interoperable, secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable healthcare systems based on a service-oriented architecture and SOAP services.

Two systems are discussed: one for remotely monitoring, recording, and replaying the vital signs data being generated in the operating rooms of the medical center, and another for patient/resource tracking based on the existing WiFi infrastructure at the center. Technical details, lessons learned, best practices, and benefits of using these technologies are also discussed.

Speaker Details

Prof. Khan holds joint positions as an associate professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in the College of Engineering, and the Department of Anesthesiology in the College of Medicine at the Ohio State University (OSU). He is also a co-director of the Collaborative for Applied Software Technology at OSU, a group formed to facilitate networking and technology/knowledge transfer within the OSU IT community, as well as central Ohio companies. His current interests include patterns for SOA (Services Based Architectures), policy based security, emerging standards for web services, applied software engineering and enterprise mission critical distributed computing. He is currently interested in enhancing “core” SOAP Web Services by using the emerging industry standard WS-* protocols (WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-Trust etc.). His team is presently using WSE (Web Services Enhancements) and recently Indigo to build novel systems for the healthcare domain based on Service Oriented Architectures. His team has also built a security infrastructure for the DOD (Wright Patterson Air force Base, Dayton, Ohio); it leverages XML web services for security, and peer to peer encrypted and secure messaging. His current projects use .NET Servers and related .NET technologies. He also has experience with the .NET Compact Framework. Prof. Khan has also conducted extensive research in theoretical as well as computational Solid State Physics. Prof. Khan is the founder of a four course Applied Software Engineering sequence for senior undergraduate and graduate students. This unique sequence is shared jointly between ECE and CSE departments. He has lectured extensively on enterprise distributed computing and security in the USA, Europe and Asia. He has strong ties with the Colleges of Engineering, Medicine and Business, as well as technology companies in the central Ohio area. Prof. Khan’s projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, Naval Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research, Air Force, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Cray Research., Lucent Technologies, and Microsoft Research.

Date:
Speakers:
Furrukh Khan and Steve Swartz
Affiliation:
Ohio State University; Microsoft