This paper reports on our experiences with using the emerging Web service technologies and tools to create a demonstration information broker system as part of our research into information management in a distributed environment. To provide a realistic context, we chose to study the use of information in the healthcare domain, and this context sets some challenging parameters and constraints for our research and for the demonstration system. In this paper, we both report on the extent to which existing Web service technologies have proved to be mature enough to meet these requirements, and also assess their current limitations.

We address the problem of large-scale data integration, where the data sources are unknown at design time, are from autonomous organisations, and may evolve. Experiments are described involving a demonstrator system in the field of health services data integration within the UK. Current Web services technology has been used extensively and largely successfully in these distributed prototype systems. The work shows that Web services provide a good infrastructure layer, but integration demands a higher level "broker" architectural layer; the paper identifies eight specific requirements for such an architecture that have emerged from the experiments, derived from an analysis of shortcomings which are collectively due to the static nature of the initial prototype. The way in which these are being met in the current version in order to achieve a more dynamic integration is described.

Effective use of heterogeneous, distributed information in a coherent, integrated fashion has long been a "holy grail". The UK Health and Social care domain is an example where a global view is needed to facilitate decision making, whilst having ethical and legal concerns. The IBHIS project aims to provide an integrated broker that enables coherent use of a set of distributed, heterogeneous data sources, whilst ensuring trustworthiness and audit. This paper presents a service-oriented federated architecture for the IBHIS broker.

Project resource management could be seen from different standpoints depending on the needs of the participating organisations and the rules or regulations of the individual projects. We present a tool for efficient allocation of project resources of a single project where there is a number of participating organisations working under the rules and regulations of a funding body. The objective of this tool is to improve the allocation of the resources (i.e. person-months) using multiple objectives (minimisation of penalties, strategic distribution of the resources for every activity between the partners, resource levelling of the resources for every participating partner). The allocation of the resources is managed by a control interface that provides all the necessary information to the project manager. Through the control interface the project manager can reallocate the resources appropriately using the aforementioned criteria according to the different events throughout the execution of the project.