Representing Knowledge Levels in Clinical Guidelines

In this paper, we argue that different levels of knowledge are involved in the representation of clinical guidelines, and that distinguishing among these levels is important from both the conceptual and the methodological point of view. In particular, at the epistemological level, one points out different types of actions and distinguishes between structural relations and control relations. On the other hand, the ontological level specifically concerns the clinical domain, consisting in the definition of the basic attributes of clinical actions and in the description of some specific types of actions. We also show how the above distinctions are important for our formalism and for the design of our acquisition module.