AN ONTOLOGY-BASED MULTIAGENT ARCHITECTURE FOR DISTRIBUTED HEALTH-CAREINFORMATION-SYSTEMS

Managing patients in a shared-care context is a knowledge-intensive ac tivity. To support cooperative work in medical care, computer technolo gy should both augment the capabilities of individual specialists and enhance their ability of interacting with each other and with computat ional resources. Thus, a major shift is needed from centralized first generation health-care information systems to distributed environments composed of several interconnected agents, cooperating in maintaining a full track of the patient clinical history and supporting health-ca re providers in all the phases of the patient-management process. This paper outlines a general methodology to make architectural choices wh ile designing or integrating new software components into a distribute d health-care information system. A particular stress is laid on the s pecification of shared conceptual models, or ontologies, providing age nts committing to them with the common semantic foundation required fo r effective interoperation.