Implementing a Coordination Agent for Modularised Case Bases

The work presented in this paper focuses on the composition of retrieval results returned by distributed case bases. We describe how different knowledge sources can be accessed using an abstract description language and in which way we handle the resulting heterogeneous information. The realisation of this query agent is a part of SEASALT, an architecture for intelligent information systems, which follows the example of collaborating human experts and further on provides an architecture that contains all aspects of knowledge utilisation. Within SEASALT knowledge is provided in distributed knowledge sources represented by a number of case based agents. The coordination agent presented in this paper uses those knowledge sources to combine information to compose information into individual answers. We evaluate our approach based on the real-life application of travel medicine and show how the retrieval in distributed case bases can be coordinated and executed.