Towards cooperative patient management through organizational and medical ontologies

Within knowledge and data engineering a new research paradigm is emerging b ased on the Multi-Agent System (MAS) architectural framework, allowing huma n and software agents to interoperate and thus cooperate within common appl ication areas. In such a framework, knowledgeable agents of heterogeneous n ature, that possess diverse but at least partially compatible or inter-tran slatable conceptual views, or ontologies, modeling both their own expertise and the external environment, make somehow available their information res ources or problem-solving abilities for cooperative processes addressing th e construction of a new agent or the achievement of some common goal throug h a correlated execution of tasks. In this paper, we restrict our analysis to the case of an organization of cognitive agents, illustrated with exampl es from a prototypical healthcare MAS, that is, a so-called Distributed Hea lthcare Information System (D-HIS). The prototype makes use of an ontologic al library written in the standard language Ontolingua, An ongoing applicat ion of the methodology to the main problem of Clinical Practice Guidelines (GLs) computer-based dissemination and enforcement is described.