Use of Protégé-2000 to Encode Clinical Guidelines

A major step in building guideline-based clinical care systems is encoding medical knowledge in guideline documents for interpretation by the computer. Guideline models provide the structure to encapsulate guideline knowledge. Developers who are familiar with the guideline model and domain experts who have relevant medical knowledge work as a team to encode guidelines using knowledge acquisition tools. Protégé-2000, developed in our laboratory, is an environment for building knowledge bases. It facilitates knowledge acquisition and maintenance. We have used Protégé-2000 to encode clinical guidelines such as the JNC6 hypertension guidelines and cancer trial protocols. Many other modeling groups are also using it in their work. In this paper, we show that Protégé-2000’s general-purpose knowledgeacquisition framework can provide a rich environment for to encode clinical guidelines.