User Customisation of Agent Profiles in the National electronic Library for Communicable Disease
Patty Kostkova, Julius Rudolph Weinberg, Gemma Madle, Jane Mani‐Saada · UCL Discovery (University College London) · 2003
The Internet provides overwhelming amount of medical information. However, healthcare professionals often cannot find the information they need when they need it and if they do the quality may be uncertain. A new Internet digital library, the National electronic Library for Communicable Disease (NeLCD), is addressing this issue by providing a single-entry portal to evidence-based information on treatment, investigation and prevention of communicable disease. Autonomous Intelligent Agents are essential for the development and runtime of the NeLCD library as they perform autonomously a number of tasks related to the search, assist humans in information publishing, the document review process and data exchange. In this paper, we present an application of Intelligent Agents in user profiling and customisation. In particular, they allow users to personalise the search, modify the input controlled vocabulary and customize the search results to better meet their needs. In addition, they can autonomously alert users about new postings according to their interests. Profiling of Intelligent Search Agents (ISA) and Pro-active Alert Agents (PAA) allows extensive customisation of the library according to user’s personal preferences, professional background and medical specialty.