Health Data Platform Simple Sign-On Challenge

About the Challenge

Background

As part of the HHS Open Government Plan, the HealthData.gov Platform (HDP) is a flagship initiative and focal point helping to establish learning communities that collaboratively evolve and mature the utility and usability of a broad range of health and human service data. HDP is leveraging Web oriented and Cloud based architecture frameworks and standards, running on open source software components to deliver enhanced Health IT infrastructure capabilities. HDP will facilitate better integration, analysis, and interpretation of our data, helping meet the growing demand for more public and private sector value added information services. Through expanded use of application programming interfaces (APIs) and the incorporation of new data element identification and metadata tagging methodologies, HDP will improve the liquidity of health data, increasing the efficiency of data transfer and the effectiveness of data distributions. Overall, HDP will deliver greater potential for new data driven insights into complex interactions of health and health care services.

To augment the HDP effort, seven complementary challenges, to be released over the course of a year, will encourage innovation around initial platform- and domain-specific priority areas, fostering opportunities to tap the creativity of entrepreneurs and productivity of developers (see http://www.healthdata.gov/developer-challenges-overview). The challenge competitions are of two types: three domain-specific challenges are intended to improve the integration and liquidity of data made available, and four platform-specific challenges are intended to enhance the capabilities of the technology components being employed. The virtual machines and codebase outputs from innovations demonstrated by challenge participants will be made publically available through HHS Github repositories (see https://github.com/hhs/) as release candidates for further community refinement as necessary, including open source licensing and contributor attribution as appropriate, with the goal being incorporation into subsequent HDP product roadmap releases.

The “Health Data Platform Simple Sign-On Challenge” will improve community engagement by providing simplified sign on (SSO) for external users interacting across multiple HDP technology components, making it easier for community collaborators to contribute, leveraging new approaches to decentralized authentication.

Challenge Description

Healthdata.gov is leveraging a variety of open source infrastructure components including the Drupal 7 content management system, the CKAN data portal, the Solr search engine, and the community edition of the Virtuoso (as a RDF database and SPARQL endpoint query service). Going forward, the HDP team intends to realize an architecture similar to the Linked Data Integration Framework[1] (LDIF) and leverage tools in the LOD2 stack[2] where possible, beginning with Ontowiki to be used as Virtuoso editor, most likely followed by SILK for cross domain correlation. HDP would like to enable service requestors to be authenticated using WebID[3] from the W3C. Some of the current and upcoming HDP infrastructure components support aspects of WebID functionality already while others do not. A number of WebID libraries are available, written in various languages[4].

This challenge winner will present a replicable open source virtual machine environment demonstrating how HDP components (with an initial emphasis on Virtuoso[5], Drupal 7[6], CKAN[7], OntoWiki[8], and Solr[9]) can provide and/or consume WebID’s, contributing to simplified sign-on for humans and machines. The developer designs how their code might utilize each component as a WebID identity provider or relying party, presumably leveraging existing capabilities to the fullest extent possible. The end result will demonstrate seamless integration across a number of HDP components, without introducing any external service dependencies that couldn’t be operated by HHS. The contributed code will be given an open source license and managed by HHS on github.com, with copyright and attribution to the developer(s) as appropriate.

Timeline

• Submission Period Begins: June 5, 2012
• Submission Period for Entries Ends: October 2, 2012
• Evaluation Process for Entries Begins: October 5, 2012
• Evaluation Process for Entries Ends: October 19, 2012
• Winners notified: October 26, 2012
• Winners Announced: Industry conference TBD

Prizes

• Total: $35,000 in prizes
• First Place: $20,000 plus conference exhibition opportunity
• Second Place: $10,000
• Third Place: $5,000

Submission Requirements

In order for an entry to be eligible to win this Challenge, it must meet the following requirements:

1. No HHS or ONC logo – The app must not use HHS’ or ONC’s logo or official seal in the Submission, and must not claim endorsement.
2. Functionality/Accuracy – A Submission may be disqualified if the software application fails to function as expressed in the description provided by the user, or if the software application provides inaccurate or incomplete information.
3. Security – Submissions must be free of malware. Contestant agrees that the ONC may conduct testing on the app to determine whether malware or other security threats may be present. ONC may disqualify the app if, in ONC’s judgment, the app may damage government or others’ equipment or operating environment.

Review Criteria

The review panel will make selections based upon the following criteria:

• Coverage: the more integrated components the better, with an emphasis on leverage existing work and capabilities of each component
• Coupling: the level with which any integrated components can be removed without affecting the remaining component functionality
• Performance: the lowest latency and best responsiveness of the component interactions as demonstrated by test cases
• Elegance: how the design deals with both human and application agents that interact with different interfaces, and how each is managed across infrastructure components
• Documentation: articulation of design using well known architecture artifacts and executable test cases
  • Engagement: willingness to participate in the community as a maintainer/committer after award

[1] http://ldif.wbsg.de/

[2] http://lod2.eu/WikiArticle/TechnologyStack.html

[3] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/wiki/Main_Page and http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/

[4] https://github.com/search?langOverride=&q=webid&repo=&start_value=1&type=Repositories

[5] http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/Main/

[6] http://www.acquia.com/Drupal-7

[7] http://ckan.org/

[8] http://lod2.eu/Project/OntoWiki.html

[9] http://lucene.apache.org/solr/