5
Figure 2 The architecture of CAPTAIN
The DASs are a set of heterogeneous, autonomous and distributed data sources. They are owned by
healthcare service providers. The DASs supplies healthcare information related to the integrated care plan,
such as service description and healthcare professionals, to the I-Broker.
The I-Broker acts as an information mediator between the P-Broker and the DASs. Both of them exchange
messages via the I-Broker so that they do not have to know detailed information about each other, such as
message formats and addresses. The I-Broker takes action in the interests of the P-Broker to gather
information from the DASs. Then, it returns the result to the P-Broker by blending the information from the
DASs into the composite form defined by the P-Broker.
The P-Broker provides a care planning service to produce the integrated care plan according to the needs of
the end-user. The P-Broker uses data and information supplied by the DASs via the I-Broker, together with
by its planning knowledge repository called “domain knowledge”. The P-Broker employs a “Planning
service” to generate the integrated care plan for the end-user. The “Planning service” uses the “Care plan
formulation service” to analyse a client’s request and formulate the requests or queries for the I-Broker. The
“Care plan implementation service”, then uses the requests to gather and analyse the information from the
DASs, via the I-Broker to create the integrated care plan for the end-user.
The semantic registry holds information about the DASs’ service descriptions. The “Publish service” and
“Inquiry service” of the semantic registry are used by the DASs and the I-Broker to publish and find the
DASs’ service description respectively.
