The Social Semantic Subweb of Virtual Patient Support Groups

Patients increasingly interact in support groups, which provide shared information and experiences about diseases, treatments, etc. Much of this interaction is mediated by the Social Web, allowing worldwide reach but lacking in semantic precision. We present an online prototype, PatientSupporter, to create a Social Semantic Subweb that will facilitate high-precision networking between patients based on ontologies and rules. PatientSupporter is an instantiation of Rule Responder that permits each patient to query other patients’ profiles for finding or initiating a matching group. Rule Responder’s External Agent (EA) is a Web-based patient-organization interface that passes queries to the Organizational Agent (OA). The OA represents the shared knowledge of the virtual patient organization, delegates queries to relevant Personal Agents (PAs) via a responsibility ontology, and passes checked PA answers back to the EA. Each PA represents the medical subarea of primary interest to an associated patient group. The PA assists its patients by advertising their interest profiles, employing rules about diseases and treatments as well as interaction constraints such as time, location, age range, gender, and number of participants. Profiles can be distributed across different rule engines using different rule languages (e.g., Prolog and N3), where rules, queries, and answers are interchanged via translation to and from RuleML/XML. We discuss the implementation of PatientSupporter in a use case of sports injuries structured by a part-whole ontology of affected body parts.