Managing diseases thru' Asclepios: An agile information exploitation framework

This paper describes the development of an open-source information system, called Asclepios, which manages a plethora of information on communicable diseases in an agile manner. Asclepios exploits information from multiple databases from both open sources (Third Party) and Second party sources. A variety of tools are available in Asclepios to perform extensive processing of numeric and texts (along with some image and video processing) so that trend information can be gleaned on various communicable diseases. The Asclepios architecture draws together a confluence of technologies and industrial standards such as: cloud computing, metadata, ontology generation and management, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, decision support system, data mining and systems engineering. Because of the use of Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) methodology for its design, the architecture is scalable, its components replaceable dynamically and configured for the requirements of a given application. The underlying architecture of Asclepios is therefore horizontal, but it has an ability to support several verticals as epidemiology, pharmacology and other fields easily. The application of Asclepios is wide ranging - from military to Government through to medical and tourism and pharmaceuticals. Further, Asclepios-like applications are very much needed in most Third world countries, including all countries in Africa, as it can significantly enhance the health, safety and well-being of people.