Summary and discussion Session 1: Mobility Joel Saltz University of Maryland No slides available.

Summary

Joel presented three scenarios from the domain of medical information systems, which he believed might be ripe application areas for the use of mobile agents.

In the first scenario, the goal is to collect and disseminate information about antibiotic usage and antibiotic resistance, worldwide, to track the spread of resistant diseases. Using this tracking information, they could give doctors recommendations about the choice of antibiotics. The goal is to find patterns of infection, predict patterns, critique prescriptions, etc. The scenario involves 10^5 to 10^7 distributed data sources, heterogeneous in both geography, machine type, network-connection quality, and data format. Need short turn-around on queries.

Q:	Is the data in very different formats?
A:	Yes, very.

Several questions on biological matters.

In the second scenario, he describes a collaborative environment for exploring multimedia databases. They have huge datasets of clinical data, and want to visualize that in a collaborative way. They want to enhance data sharing, data mining, and support associative searches, all in the context of long-distance conferencing.

The third scenario involves medical command and control. They sometimes need to track down a physician to locate patient information, and that can be difficult. Patient information can be spread across many different databases, owned by different organizations, and yet they need to integrate all of that information when working with a patient. Information brokers may tie together many sources.

Questions and comments

Q:	All these scenarios need distributed information systems, but why mobile agents?
A:	Not clear, other than the usual reasons to use mobile agents for distributed database access (move the code to the data)
Q:	How do you choose between a specialized query language, stored procedures, or mobile agents?
A:	We don't know yet.

Comment:	The testbed should not be monolithic.
Comment:	Guideware built a diabetes patient-monitoring system several years ago.