Overview

One of the interfaces that OpenEMPI provides for integrating it into an existing Health IT infrastructure is a web services interface that complies with the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style. For more information about the principles behind the REST architectural style we recommend reading the thesis of Fielding available at his home site. We also followed the JCP specification 311 in our implementation to make sure that our design and implementation is based on the currently available Java standards.

The following is an overview of the REST interface OpenEMPI.

• There are currently two different resources that are exposed by the Web Services interface. There is the Person Query Resource, which provides various querying capabilities against the system, and the Person Manager Resource, which provides person data management capabilities such as adding new records, modifying existing records, creating links between records, etc.
• Currently the repository manages person information modeled using the HL7 model for representing a person entity, and each person is assumed to have one or more identifiers associated with the person record, as identifiers are assigned to a person at different facilities. Examples of identifiers include a Social Security Number, a Medical Record Number or a global identifier.
• We have not exposed the administrative interface of OpenEMPI currently since most sites will manage the operation of the system through the administrative console.

The raw wadl file for this RESTful interface is available here and the referenced xsd0.xsd is here.