Agent-Based Up-to-date Data Management in National electronic Library for Communicable Disease

Abstract

Modern healthcare specialists are overwhelmed with medical information available on the Internet. However, it is difficult to find a particular piece of information when and where they actually need it. The National electronic Library for Health (NeLH) is addressing this issue by providing a single-entry portal to evidence-based medical information on the Internet enhanced with a quality tag assigned by professional experts in the field. In order to fully utilize the potential of an Internet-based library, the NeLH is distributed and consists of a number of Virtual Branch Libraries (VBLs), each dedicated to a particular disease or a medical area. Our team is responsible for the development of the communicable disease branch of the NeLH, calledNeLCD (National electronic Library for Communicable Disease). VBLs are dynamically updated and their design reflects the needs of each particular user base. However, users accessing a single VBL may want to search the entire NeLH or should have the option of being able to search the entire NeLH. Therefore, support for a distributed search according to an adopted topology ofVBL servers is essential. Intelligent interface agents are essential for the development and runtime of the library as they perform autonomously a number of tasks related to the search, assist humans in information publishing, the document review process and data exchange and retrieval. In this paper, we present an agent-based solution to assist in distributed search across the NeLH, and customization and personalization in the NeLCD