Towards cooperative patient management through organizational and medical ontologies.
Within knowledge and data engineering a new research paradigm is emerging based on the Multi-Agent System (MAS) architectural framework, allowing human and software agents to interoperate and thus cooperate within common application areas. In such a framework, knowledgeable agents of heterogeneous nature, that possess diverse but at least partially compatible or inter-translatable conceptual views, or ontologies, modeling both their own expertise and the external environment, make somehow available their information resources or problem-solving abilities for cooperative processes addressing the construction of a new agent or the achievement of some common goal through a correlated execution of tasks. In this paper, we restrict our analysis to the case of an organization of cognitive agents, illustrated with examples from a prototypical healthcare MAS, that is, a so-called Distributed Healthcare Information System (D-HIS). The prototype makes use of an ontological library written in the standard language Ontolingua. An ongoing application of the methodology to the main problem of Clinical Practice Guidelines (GLs) computer-based dissemination and enforcement is described.
Falasconi
S
S
Dept of Informatics and Systems Science, University of Pavia, Italy. sabina@ipvaimed6.unipv.it
Dazzi
L
L
Lanzola
G
G
Quaglini
S
S
Saracco
R
R
Stefanelli
M
M
D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D008491:Medical Informatics Applications; D008492:Medical Informatics Computing; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D012984:Software