László Zsolt Varga

The provenance of electronic data

It would include details of the processes that produced electronic data as far back as the beginning of time or at least the epoch of provenance awareness.

Using Archon to develop real-world DAI applications. 1

Archon provides a software framework that assists interaction between the subcomponents of a distributed AI application, and a design methodology that helps structure these interactions. The Archon project has been applied to several real world industrial applications. Two of these applications, electricity transportation management and particle accelerator control, have run online in the organizations for which they were developed-Iberdrola, a Spanish electric utility, and the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). Archons problem solving entities are called agents; they can control their own problem solving and interact with other community members. The interactions typically involve agents cooperating and communicating with one another to enhance their individual problem solving and to better solve the overall application problem. Each agent consists of an Archon layer and an application program (known as an intelligent system).

Provenance in Agent-Mediated Healthcare Systems

People are increasingly cooperating to share electronic information and techniques throughout various industries. In healthcare applications, data (a single patients healthcare history), workflow (procedures carried out on that patient), and logs (a recording of meaningful procedural events) are often distributed among several heterogeneous and autonomous information systems. Understanding a patients treatment history can help healthcare providers make treatment decisions. Provenance-aware applications can facilitate this process by tracing events, event dependencies, and provider decisions across various healthcare institutions

K4Care: Knowledge-Based Homecare e-Services for an Ageing Europe

Increasing longevity and increasing survival to acute accidents and diseases - in addition to the increase in the numbers of elderly people - imply an increased prevalence of chronic morbidity and disability. The elderly population needing full time care is considered as equivalent to the percentage of severely disabled elderly, which in turn is estimated to be 5% for the 65–69 year-old age group, 10% for the 70–79 age group, and 30% for the 80 and over age group [2]; this population can sum up to ten million people in the EU 25 area [3]. The care of chronic and disabled patients involves life long treatment under continuous expert supervision. Moreover, healthcare professionals and patients agree that institutionalization in hospitals or residential facilities may be unnecessary and even counterproductive. Home Care (HC) has been considered as a fundamental component of a network of long term care facilities, capable of reducing institutionalization, expenses and risk of death. The objective of an effective HC has the direct social implication of helping people partially or completely dependent to live in their environment as long as possible, and to contrast the improper use of institutionalization. It has to be considered that the care of the HC Patient (HCP) is particularly complex because of the growing number of people in such circumstances, because of the great amount of resources required to guarantee a quality long-term assistance, and because the typical HCP is an elderly patient, with co-morbid conditions and diseases, cognitive and/or physical impairment, functional loss from multiple disabilities, and impaired self-dependency.

Applying provenance in distributed organ transplant management

The use of ICT solutions applied to Healthcare in distributed scenarios should not only provide improvements in the distributed processes and services they are targeted to assist but also provide ways to trace all the meaningful events and decisions taken in such distributed scenario. Provenance is an innovative way to trace such events and decisions in Distributed Health Care Systems, by providing ways to recover the origin of the collected data from the patients and/or the medical processes. Here we present a work in progress to apply provenance in the domain of distributed organ transplant management.

Engineering web service invocations from agent systems

This paper presents a methodology that helps to bridge the gap between the theoretical foundations of agent technologies and their potential for industry-wide deployment. Agent systems are very often developed on top of a legacy system where agents have to be able to access the legacy system, usually web services, through a non-agent protocol and they have to be able to communicate with each other using an agent language. The methodology shows how existing web services can be integrated into agent systems. We have implemented tools to support the application of the methodology to mass amount of web service applications and a sample application to demonstrate the usage of the methodology and the supporting tools.

An agent based approach for migrating web services to semantic web services

Semantic web services are considered as the concept bringing the web to its full potential by combining the best features of web services, agent technology, grid and the semantic web. In this paper we present an agent based architecture for migrating existing web services to the semantic web service environment. We developed the WSDL2Agent tool to support the migration. The tool automatically generates a Protege project. With human interaction semantic information not present in the WSDL description can be added in Protege and the project can be exported in OWL format. From the enhanced OWL description we can directly derive the skeletons of the elements of the Web Services Modeling Framework. The tool automates the most tedious tasks of the migration process and the users can focus on the semantic aspects.

An intelligent platform to provide home care services

The progressive increase in the percentage of old people in all European countries implies an enormous economic and social cost, which can be somehow reduced if Home Care services are improved. The K4Care European project is studying the feasibility of using Information and Communication Technologies to improve the management of Home Care. This paper details the project objectives, the K4Care Home Care model, and the declarative and procedural knowledge needed in Home Care. It also describes the architecture of the agent-based web-accessible K4Care platform, and how the intelligent agents coordinate their actions to provide the basic Home Care services defined in the model.

Knowledge Driven Architecture for Home Care

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in health-care domains are showing a rapid increase, in order to manage complex tasks and adapt gracefully to unexpected events. On the other hand, the lack of well-established agent-oriented engineering methodologies to transform knowledge level descriptions into deployable agent systems slackens MAS development. This paper presents a new methodology in modelling and automatically implementing agents in a home care domain. The representation of the application knowledge together with the codification of health care treatments lead to flexible realization of an agent platform that has the capability to capture new medical knowledge emerging from physicians.

Navigating Provenance Information for Distributed Healthcare Management

Provenance information provides a useful basis to verify whether a particular application behavior has been adhered to. This is particularly useful to evaluate the basis for a particular outcome, as a result of a process, and to verify if the process involved in making the decision conforms to some pre-defined set of rules. This is significant in a healthcare scenario, where it is necessary to demonstrate that patient data has been processed in a particular way. Understanding how provenance information may be recorded, stored, and subsequently analyzed by a decision maker is therefore significant in a service oriented architecture, which involves the use of third party services over which the decision maker does not have control. The aggregation of data from multiple sources of patient information plays an important part in subsequent treatments that are proposed for a patient. A tool to navigate through and analyze such provenance information is proposed, based on the use of a portal framework that allows different views on provenance information to co-exist. The portal enables users to add custom portlets enabling application specific views that would facilitate particular decision making