Case Study I: Ontology-Based Multi-Agent System for Human Disease Studies

In this chapter, we shall put the Onto-Agents Methodology into practice and use it step by step to develop a Generic Human Disease Ontology (GHDO) and to design a multi-agent system that can use the designed GHDO for intelligent information retrieval. In Section 2, we discuss the domain of human diseases, the purpose of the ontology, the community of users and agents for which this ontology is being developed, and applications based on the designed ontology. The aligning and merging of existing medical ontologies against the defined ontology structure is discussed in Section 3. Section 4 describes how to design the ontology base, while Section 5 explains the design of the ontology commitment layer. In Section 6, we discuss the evaluation of the GHDO. In Section 7, we identify and describe different groups of agents according to their functions and responsibilities within the system. In Section 8, we describe a mechanism by which GHDO ontology is used in this system during the processes of problem solving, task and result sharing, and assembling of results. In Section 9, we focus on the structural organization of the agents within the system and define agents’ collaborations. Individual agent structure and agents’ components are described in Section 10. In Section 11, we discuss security issues within the multi-agent system. Examples of the use of the designed systems are given in Section 12.