Agent-Based Semantic Service Discovery for Healthcare: An Organizational Approach

Abstract

This article is part of a special issue on Intelligent Agents in Healthcare. E-health is one of the fastest-growing application areas for intelligent mobile services. The ever-growing number and variety of health-related devices and tasks calls for mechanisms to automatically discover, invoke, and coordinate the corresponding services. This, in turn, requires languages and tools that support a semantically rich description of e-health services. This article focuses on service discovery for medical-emergency management. A new mechanism for semantic service discovery complements existing approaches by considering relevant parts of the organizational context in which e-health services are used, to improve system usability in emergencies. This approach is reusable in other application areas, especially in the medical field.