Use of Ontology-Based Multi-Agent Systems in the Biomedical Domain

Coordination, cooperation and exchange of information is important to the medical community. We design a new ontology, called Generic Human Disease Ontology (GHDO), by merging and aligning existing medical ontologies. The concepts of the GHDO are organized into the following four dimensions: Types, Symptoms, Causes and Treatments of human diseases. We also design a multi-agent system framework over different information resources. The multi-agent system uses the common GHDO ontology for query formulation, information retrieval and information integration. We conclude that this intelligent dynamic system provides opportunities to collect information from multiple information resources, to share data efficiently and to integrate and manage scientific results in a timely manner.