Federated management of information for TeleCARE

Distributed information management plays a fundamental role within the base infrastructure supporting the elderly care domain. Specificities of this domain include the autonomy and independence of its involved actors, the critical data that is handled about individuals, and the variety of hardware/software resources supporting the elderly care environment. A federated information management system coping with these requirements is designed and integrated as a core component of a mobile agent-based infrastructure, to support collaborative networks for elderly care. Functionalities for: federated schema management, federated query processing, HW/SW resource management, specification and enforcement of visibility/access rights to data and resources, and an ontology-based automatic schema generation facility are introduced, and their implementation details are briefly discussed.