Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

286 M. Hadzic, M. Chen, and R. Brouwer
negative effect of these emotions on our health. Their toxic effect may result in a
variety of illnesses including hypertension, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis,
multiple sclerosis and some types of cancer.
3.5 Physical and Spiritual Health
Powell et al. [34] report positive association between physical health and spirituality.
The researchers state that the risk of mortality is reduced by 25% in
church/service attendees. They provide additional evidence that the religion or
spirituality protects against cardiovascular disease through by the healthy lifestyle
the doctrine encourages. Dr Wright [35] discusses and explains spiritual roots of
numerous diseases, possible spiritual blocks to healing and spiritual pathways to
health and wellbeing.
3.6 Mental and Spiritual Health
Dr D’Souza [36] claims that the majority of mentally ill patients rate spirituality as
very important and desire their therapist to take their spiritual needs into consideration.
From this study it appears that majority of the mentally ill patients are
spiritual in one way or the other. One would ask here if the spirituality triggered
the mental disorder in the first place. Bergin [37] addresses this issue as he evaluates
the effect of spirituality on mental health. He makes it clear that religion can
have both positive and negative effect. The negative situations are marked by evil
being clothed in religious language, namely, misuse of religion for personal interests
and gains. The positive impact is marked by a personalized experience, a true
personal conviction or commitment and is manifested in dramatic personal healing
or transformation.
The physical, mental, financial, social, emotional and spiritual wellbeing are interconnected
and mutually dependant on one another. For this reason, we need to
approach total wellbeing as being a function of multiple dimensions. This necessitates
analysis of each dimension individually and in relation to other dimensions.
We can find no evidence that such multidimensional research has ever been performed.
In the following section we describe a multi-agent system that can help
the integrated study of the total wellbeing and help us gain a clearer understanding
of the interrelationships and interdependencies between the six dimensions.
4 A Holonic Multi-agent System for Total Wellbeing
In this section, we describe a multi-agent system that can be used to intelligently
retrieve, manage and use information about total wellbeing. In this system, total
wellbeing is seen as a function of physical, mental, relational, emotional, financial
and spiritual wellbeing. The TICSA approach, described in [38], can be used to
design the multi-agent system. The TICSA methodology consists of the following
five steps:
1. Identify Agent Types According to Their Responsibilities
2. Define Agent’s Intelligence