Representation of Clinical Practice Guideline Components in OWL

The main purpose to attain with the advent of clinical decision support systems is either to improve the quality of patient care or to reduce the occurrence of clinical malpractice, such as medical errors and defensive medicine. It is therefore necessary a machine-readable support to integrate the recommendations of Clinical Practice Guidelines in such systems. CompGuide is a Computer-Interpretable Guideline model developed under Ontology Web Language that offers support for administrative information concerning a guideline, workflow procedures, and the definition of clinical and temporal constraints. When compared to other models of the same type, besides having a comprehensive task network model, it introduces new temporal representations and the possibility of reusing pre-existing knowledge and integrating it in a guideline.