Towards an intelligent exploitation of heterogeneous and distributed resources in cooperative environments of eHealth

The objective of this research work is to empower healthcare information systems to deliver high quality information anytime and anywhere and to present distributed and heterogeneous resources access solutions which perfectly meet user requirements in different contexts. To reach this objective, we propose in this paper a new framework, called ONtology Oriented Framework for Pervasive Applications and Services (ONOF-PAS). and mainly based on: 1) interrelated ontological models representing the main entities in pervasive computing, such as Organization, Actor. Task, Service, Process. Object, Resources, etc.; 2) rule-based reasoning to infer the available and capable resources required by each task. The main functionality of the ONOF-PAS framework is to capture and to process the acquired knowledge about the user's context, the tasks they perform, the availability and capabilities of the required resources, and the organizations that own or manage these resources. Our framework allows healthcare information systems to infer the needed resources by linking each user-task with the required, available and capable resources taking into account the clinical conditions of the patients. The ONOF-PAS framework has been successfully applied in the telemedicine domain in order to provide practical and efficient resources access solutions that better meet the contexts and the expectations of the eHealth actors. (C) 2013 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.