Holonic multi-agent system complemented by human disease ontology supporting biomedical community

Abstract

The medical milieu is an open environment characterized by a variety of distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous information resources. Coordination, cooperation and exchange of information is important to the medical community. This paper presents an ontology-based holonic multi-agent system that combines the advantages of the holonic paradigm with multi-agent system technology and ontology design, in order to realize a highly reliable, adaptive, scalable, flexible and robust diagnostic system for diseases. We design a new ontology, called generic human disease ontology (GHDO), for the representation of knowledge regarding human diseases. The concepts of the GHDO ontology are organized into the following four dimensions: types, symptoms, causes and treatments of human diseases. The holonic multi-agent system uses this common GHDO ontology for purpose of query formulation, information retrieval and information integration. This intelligent dynamic system provides opportunities to collect information from multiple information resources, to share data efficiently and to integrate and manage scientific results in a timely manner. We believe such a technique is expected to become the norm once existing resources (e.g. disease databases) will have become unlocked semantically through annotation with a shared ontology