On the Contributors to “System Smartness”: A “Med Net Agent System” Case Study

This paper presents an example of how of ‘intelligence’ is designed into a distributed system. The exemplar is Med Net Agent system. The Med Net Agent system, developed and prototyped in response to customer requirements, may be viewed as an ontology driven, agent-based, integrated system that incorporates both patient information and disease information. The Med Net Agent system design offers diagnosis support to the human clinician via Bayesian networks and via a medical information repository. This system is designed to work within the framework of the Theater Medical Information Program. Contributors to the system ‘intelligence’ include the use of semantic technologies, Bayesian networks, and the design for communication and information updates.