Three Compatible Mechanisms for Representing Medical Context Implicitly

An important aspect of context in medical reasoning is the notion of "variation" of a chunk of knowledge according to various contingencies, such as course of patient's disease, response to therapies, or team specificity. Our position is to represent these variations implicitly, by proposing mechanisms to factor knowledge and to refine it. We propose three mutually compatible mechanisms that effectively contribute to represent slight variations of knowledge in a representation framework integrating object-oriented programming and rule-based programming. We illustrate them with examples extracted from various knowledge bases for the management of mechanical ventilation.