The Data Abstraction Layer as Knowledge Provider for a Medical Multi-agent System Montserrat Batet 1 , Karina Gibert 2 , and Aida Valls 1 1 ITAKA, Intelligent Technologies for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition, Dept. of Computer Engineering and Maths, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. Pa¨ısos Catalans 26, E-43007 Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain {montserrat.batet,aida.valls}@urv.cat 2 Departament d’Estad´ıstica i Investigaci´o Operativa, Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord, Ed. C5, c/ Jordi Girona 1-3, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain karina.gibert@upc.edu Abstract. The care of senior patients requires a great amount of human and sanitary resources. The K4Care Project is developing a new Euro- pean model to improve the home care assistance of these patients. This medical model will be supported by an intelligent platform. This plat- form has two main layers: a multi-agent system and a knowledge layer. In this paper, it is reviewed the initial design of the system, and some improvements are presented. The main contribution is the introduction of an intermediate layer between agents and knowledge: the Data Ab- straction Layer. Using this additional layer agents can have a transparent access to many different knowledge sources, which have data stored in different languages. In addition, the new layer would make possible to make intelligent treatment of the queries in order to generate answers in a more effective and efficient way. Keywords: knowledge representation, knowledge engineering, home care, multi-agent systems. 1 Introduction The care of senior patients that suffer chronic diseases requires life long treat- ments under the continuous supervision of a group of people in charge of provid- ing medical care. The European project K4CARE: “Knowledge-Based Homecare eServices for an Ageing Europe“ will develop a distributed platform to improve the capabilities of the new EU society to manage a personalized Home Care assistance of the increasing number of senior population. The main two objectives of K4Care project are: (1) to create a sanitary model at European Level for the care of senior patients that suffer chronic diseases or are disabled and need a treatment; (2) to design and implement an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platform that supports this model. With respect to the first goal, it is tried to unify the way in which medical centers of different countries work, so that the exchange of information between centres will D. Ria˜ no (Ed.): K4CARE 2007, LNAI 4924, pp. 87–100, 2008. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008