Towards ease of building legos in assessing ehealth language technologies: A RESTful laboratory for data and software

More and more scientific literature, care guidelines, health records, social media, and other textual eHealth information are electronically available. Language technologies provide a way to analyse these documents for the bene-fit of both individuals and populations. In order to catalyse the development of eHealth language technologies, we propose a virtual laboratory with a standardised platform for easy building and assessment of the systems from the "lego" bricks of shared data, resources, and software. Our aim is to address specific needs in eHealth: governance and shar-ing of private data; provenance and sharing of resources and software; system-atic benchmarking and quality control of systems and their components; and collaboration of eHealth language technology developers and users across healthcare services, academia, industry, and government. The Epicure virtual laboratory is intended to be used for software and re-source evaluation and development as well as for data analysis if data subjects' privacy is ensured. Epicure is a meta-framework in the sense of abstracting over existing frameworks. Its five roles for clients are data or resource provider, ap-plication assembler, application user, software developer, and sys-tem administrator. We have implemented Epicure based on publicly available software. Its con-trol layer is a Glassfish JavaEE server, providing a RESTful (REpresentational State Transfer) application programming interface; web interface for accessing and installing third-party platforms; and easy operation via standard web com-mands. After proper user authentication and authorisation of incoming requests, it builds applications, analyses data and assesses outcomes by orchestrating storage and execution layers. The storage layer of Epicure uses a CouchDB-based repository for centralised storage of data, resources, and software. It ena-bles controlling document access on the level of documents; tracking all chang-es; recording these revisions; storing all analysis outcomes; and associating the outcomes with the data, resources and software used in their generation. The execution layer of Epicure provides a runtime environment for executing data analysis tasks and installing third party platforms. It invokes tools as simple commands. A tool must be specify its input format, output formats, parameters, and their possible values as a file and be executable on a command line. Tools do not need to be installed within Epicure itself but instead be accessed via a network interface and wrapper, which provides access from Epicure to this re-mote service.