Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

282 M. Hadzic, M. Chen, and R. Brouwer
the multi-agent system to find solutions to complex problems that are usually impossible
to be solved by individual agents.
Additional advantage of agent-based systems is mobility of agents. Agents can
be created as being capable of migrating to different places and execute their actions
at different places. Addition of mobile agents has the potential to increase
dynamics and efficiency of the whole system.
Our research focus is the implementation of agent-based systems within health
domain, more specifically, in the study of total wellbeing. Our health and wellbeing
is not only determined by our physical health but also by mental health, our
emotions, relationships, financial situation and spirituality. A huge body of the information
is available on these and related topics. The thee main issues hindering
effective use of the available information include [1]:
(1) size of the available information
(2) information resources of autonomous, distributed and heterogeneous nature,
and
(3) lack of tools to systematically analyse the huge body of available information
and derive useful knowledge from it.
Health professionals and general public are faced with numerous difficulties,
from more specific problems such as complex nature of the health (as explained in
Section 3) to more generic problems such as [1,2]:
(1) amount of health information is rapidly increasing as new papers and journals
are increasingly being published and added to the existing information resources
(2) available information is found in inconsistent structures which is a result of
autonomous information resources, and
(3) various information resources contain related, overlapping and semicomplementary
information but we lack tools to identify these occurrences.
In this paper we present a multi-agent system that will enable efficient and effective
use of health-related information. A number of multi-agent systems have
been implemented within medical and health domain and these are discussed in
Section 2. We focus specifically on the information that is related to the total
wellbeing and relationships between different dimensions of the total wellbeing.
We explain the complex nature of total wellbeing and discuss related studies in
Section 3. In Section 4, we use the TICSA approach [34] to design the multi-agent
system. We give our final remarks in Section 5.
2 Multi-agent Systems and Ontologies in Health Domain
Multi-agent systems are increasingly being used in the medical and health domain.
Implementation of agent-based systems empowers practitioners, scientist, patients
and general public to address their needs in a more relevant way. Some of the existing
agent-based systems are designed to use information specific to a medical
and health organizations; others use information from the Internet.