A multi-agent-based, semantic-driven system for decision support in epidemic management.

Issues in epidemiology are truly multidisciplinary, requiring knowledge from diverse disciplines such as sociology, medicine, biology, geography and information science. Such inherent complexity has led to a challenge in developing decision support systems for epidemic information management, especially when data are from heterogeneous origins. In order to achieve a solution, an integrative framework is proposed. The Semantic Web is introduced in the context of enriching meaningful and machine-readable descriptions of epidemiological data. Software agents are utilised to achieve automation in semantic discovery, composition of data and process services. The objective is to enhance the performance in information retrieval in a dynamic decision-making environment while concealing technical complexity from inexperienced users. We illustrate how a prototype system can be developed by considering an epidemiology management scenario in which spatio-temporal analysis is undertaken of a specified epidemic.