Designing a community-based social trust system in public health using Service Oriented Architecture

One of the major challenges of community-based research is recruitment of community members who will participate in clinical trials, continue for the duration of the trial, and provide accurate, sensitive personal information. This challenge can be overcome by establishing greater trust between researchers and communities. This study focused on designing a system to address trust issues between a community and clinical researchers. The study described a methodology for translating non-functional wants and needs into technical requirements that were used as input to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to design a solution. Unlike a typical SOA that is derived from a single enterprise´s business goals and processes, this solution was based on multiple stakeholder goals and general clinical trial processes. The resulting architecture focused on improving communication between researchers and communities and was validated by mapping the technical requirements against a trust-building model and by modeling the solution using Petri nets.