The Data Abstraction Layer as Knowledge Provider for a Medical Multi-agent System

The care of senior patients requires a great amount of human and sanitary resources. The K4Care Project is developing a new European model to improve the home care assistance of these patients. This medical model will be supported by an intelligent platform. This platform has two main layers: a multi-agent system and a knowledge layer. In this paper, it is reviewed the initial design of the system, and some improvements are presented. The main contribution is the introduction of an intermediate layer between agents and knowledge: the Data Abstraction Layer. Using this additional layer agents can have a transparent access to many different knowledge sources, which have data stored in different languages. In addition, the new layer would make possible to make intelligent treatment of the queries in order to generate answers in a more effective and efficient way.

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