The Cancer Treatment World demo

Demo application: Cancer Treatment World Demo

About the demo

The start page of the demo shows an alphabetical index to cover various kinds of cancer. In a fully developed version this will lead to many different meeting places for a variety of conditions and subject areas in the field of cancer treatment and trials.

For the purposes of this demo though, only one path to a single meeting place is included (See in the "R" index: "Rectal Cancer" and follow the red sub links). This demonstrates the general idea with the aid of a few physicians and a few treatment trials.

Purpose of the portal

The CTW organic portal has two purposes:

1) To provide a source of reference for people seeking information and knowledge on a variety of cancer conditions and the treatments currently available

2) To provide contact areas for physicians looking for patients to take part in treatment trials and patients looking for treatment trials that will give them early access to advanced treatments that are not generally available.

 

Non participation

For most people, it will be sufficient simply to use the viewing panel. This will require no involvement as the memories of all agents are open to public inspection in every meeting place.

The meeting places each have three rooms:

1) For the agents of medical practitioners.

2) For the agents of patients, their friends and relatives.

3) For agents that have details of cancer treatment trials

Each of the agents have memories that contain the answers to a set of questions posed to the agent's owners. From these, visitors to the portal can learn about the owners and discover all manner of interesting sources of information.

The memory of each agent can be inspected individually, or, all agent answers can be seen for a particular question.

Notice that you can compare how different agents answer a particular question while reading the memory of a single agent (by clicking on the question in the agent profile).

Similarly, when viewing all the answers given for a particular question, you can look up the profile of any agent giving an answer (by clicking on the name next to their answer).

Participation

To participate you need to create an agent. This involves nothing more than answering a series of questions These answers are then used to create the agent's memory.

The questions are designed such that an agent can represent its owner in providing useful information in the particular field the owner is specializing in. This information will be of interest to:

a) Patients whose cancer condition is within the scope of the agent owner's field of expertise.

b) Patients who are seeking treatment trials within the agent owner's field of expertise.

c) Doctors and physicians looking for expert assistance in dealing with a cancer condition they are unfamiliar with.

Obviously, an indication of the level of expertise of the owner should be included. The questions to be answered provide a broad scope for this purpose. More importantly though, the agent memory should contain interesting pointers to information sources that will be useful to others.

The meeting rooms are designed to have a limited number of agents. When they become full, some agents are removed to a new meeting room for the purpose of increased specialization. However, account will be taken of the quality of the information being pointed to by the agents. Agents with inferior quality information might be removed altogether. This is an evolutionary strategy to ensure that the quality of information in meeting rooms continually improves.