An agent-based federated information system for telecare environments

In modern networked telecare environments, information sources are typically distributed among several geographical sites and their availability varies over the time. Moreover, care related information is typically located on heterogeneous database management systems, or yet stored in complex legacy systems. The introduction of multi-agent systems in telecare has proved to be highly effective for information exchange. Although they can provide a rich mechanism for information brokerage, they still do not tackle the issue of retrieving data from the heterogeneous sources. In this paper, we describe an approach that combines aspects of federated databases and with those of agent systems in order to access and retrieve information homogenously. This paper explores the architecture of an agent-based information management system, developed under the context of TeleCARE project, with a focal point on ‘intelligent’ strategies for data assembly during federated query processing.