Structured Knowledge Acquisition for Asbru

There are several efforts to map clinical guidelines to a form, which can be further processed by special programs. All these approaches have a common drawback: they do not allow to define a persistent connection between the original guideline and its computerized version. Therefore, it is often difficult to comprehend the translation process at a later time. This thesis introduces a tool that was designed to overcome this drawback. It was developed as part of the Asgaard project, which aims at developing methods and tools for authoring, validation and execution of clinical guidelines. The so-called Guideline Markup Tool (GMT) facilitates the translation of guidelines into the guideline representation language Asbru, which is also part of the Asgaard project. On the one hand, this tool enables creating links between the original guideline and its Asbru representation. On the other hand, it supports constructing a new Asbru guideline through providing macros, which combine one or more Asbru elements with their attributes. As a second part of this work, a macros file for the GMT has been written, which provides many useful macros for the creation of Asbru guidelines. To examine the usability of the GMT and the usefulness of the Asbru macros, an evaluation with eight participants with different skills has been performed.