LifeLines: Visualizing personal histories

LifeLines provide a general visualization environment for personal histories that can be applied to medical and court records, professional histories and other types of biographical data. A one screen overview shows multiple facets of the records. Aspects, for example medical conditions or legal cases, are displayed as individual time lines, while icons indicate discrete events, such as physician consultations or legal reviews. Line color and thickness illustrate relationships or significance, scaling tools and filters allow users to focus on part of the information. LifeLines reduce the chances of missing information, facilitate spotting anomalies and trends, streamline access to details, while remaining tailorable and easily sharable between applications. The paper describes the use of LifeLines for youth records of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice and also for medical records. User's feedback was collected using a Visual Basic prototype for the youth record. Techniques to deal with complex records are reviewed and issues of a standard personal record format are discussed. additional reference numbers in the format of the next line (Also cross-referenced as CAR-TR-787, ISR-TR-95-88

The design and performance of MedJava

The Java programming language has gained substantial popularity in the past two years. Java’s networking features, along with the growing number of Web browsers that execute Java applets, facilitate Internet programming. Despite the popularity of Java, however, there are many concerns about its efficiency. In particular, networking and computation performance are key concerns when considering the use of Java to develop performance-sensitive distributed applications. This paper makes three contributions to the study of Java for performance-sensitive distributed applications. First, we describe an architecture using Java and the Web to develop Med-Java, which is a distributed electronic medical imaging system with stringent networking and computation requirements. Second, we present benchmarks of MedJava image processin

Matchmaking among Heterogeneous Agents on the Internet

The Internet is not only providing data for users to browse, but also databases to query, and software agents to run. Due to the exponential increase of deployed agents on the Internet, automating the search and selection of relevant agents is essential for both users and collaboration among di#erent software agents. This paper first describes the agent capability description language Larks. Then we will discuss the matchmaking process using Larks and give a complete working scenario. The paper concludes with comparing our language and the matchmaking process with related works. Wehave implemented Larks and the associated powerful matchmaking process, and are currently incorporating it within our RETSINA multi-agent infrastructure framework

LifeLines: Visualizing Personal Histories

LifeLines provide a general visualization environment for personal histories that can be applied to medical and court records, professional histories and other types of biographical data. A one screen overview shows multiple facets of the records. Aspects, for example medical conditions or legal cases, are displayed as individual time lines, while icons indicate discrete events, such as physician consultations or legal reviews. Line color and thickness illustrate relationships or significance, rescaling tools and filters allow users to focus on part of the information. LifeLines reduce the chances of missing information, facilitate spotting anomalies and trends, streamline access to details, while remaining tailorable and easily transferable between applications. The paper describes the use of LifeLines for youth records of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice and also for medical records. User's feedback was collected using a Visual Basic prototype for the youth record. Techniq..