Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

288 M. Hadzic, M. Chen, and R. Brouwer
system. The systematic and meaningful organization of the information will enable
efficient and effective retrieval of the information as well as meaningful representation
of the information to the user.
Note that the Total Wellbeing Ontology will evolve as more knowledge on this
topic becomes available. We aim to combine Data Mining and Multi-agent technologies
to design a system that will help to update the Total Wellbeing Ontology
on a regular basis.
4.3 Define Agent’s Collaborations
In the first stage of the TICSA design methodology we identified different types
of agent in line with their different functions within the multi-agent system. In this
stage we will define structural organization and position of agents within the system.
We need to create system architecture that will enable the most optimal performance
of agents. The agents have to be organized in such way that the problem
solving process can easily flow towards its completion and the communication between
different agents can be easily established at any stage of the processing cycle.
Addressing those two issues effectively has the potential to greatly contribute
to the efficient and effective performance of the system. In some cases, a system
with a simple organization of agents functions the best. In other cases it may be
required to design a more complex system to address the needs of complex problem
at hand.
Similar to work described in [12], we propose a Holonic Multi-agent Structure
(shown in Figure 1) as a nested hierarchy of six holarchies in which each of the six
Total wellbeing Ontology dimensions (Physical, Mental, Relational, Emotional,
Financial and Spiritual Wellbeing) is associated with one holarchy. The holarchy
agents will have the role of Information agents and will retrieve information specific
to their holarchy. They will search for information to reveal interrelationships
between the different dimensions. For example, agents of Physical holarchy will
retrieve information regarding relationships between Physical dimension and any
other dimension defined by the Total Wellbeing Ontology. Note that it will not retrieve
information about Physical dimension alone as that is not the purpose of this
project.
All the information retrieved by the Information agents of the six holarchies
will be forwarded to the Intelligent agent. The Intelligent Agent has three main
functions. Firstly, it needs to validate the information received from the Information
agents. Some of the retrieved information may come from web pages that
contain personal opinions and not scientific results of evidence-based studies. Invalid
information may be kept separately for referencing purpose but will not be
incorporated into the dedicated database until more evidence is found to support
that statement. Second function of the Intelligent agent is to systematically organize
the retrieved information within a dedicated database. The agent uses the Total
Wellbeing Ontology for this purpose. Third function of the Intelligent agent is to
retrieve specific information when requested by the Interface agent.