A Distributed, Service-Based Framework for Knowledge Applications With Multimedia

The current trend in distributed systems is towards service-based integration. This article describes an ontology-driven framework implemented to provide knowledge management for data of different modalities, with multimedia processing, annotation, and reasoning provided by remote services. The framework was developed in, and is presented in the context of, the Medical Imaging and Advanced Knowledge Technologies (MIAKT) project that sought to support the Multidisciplinary Meetings (MDMs) that take place during breast cancer screening for diagnosing the patient. However, the architecture is entirely independent of the specific application domain and can be quickly prototyped into new domains. An Enterprise server provides resource access to a client-side presentation application which, in turn, provides knowledge visualization and markup of any supported media, as defined by a domain-dependent ontology-supported language.