JAMIA Nov. 02

web applications that facilitate the acquisition, integration, and dissemination of multimedia biomedical data over the web, thereby reducing the cost of knowledge sharing. There is a lack of highlevel web application development tools suitable for use by researchers, clinicians, and educators who are not skilled programmers. Our Web Interfacing Repository Manager (WIRM) is a software toolkit that reduces the complexity of building custom biomedical web applications. WIRM’s visual modeling tools enable domain experts to describe the structure of their knowledge, from which WIRM automatically generates full-featured, customizable content management systems. ■ J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2002;9:557–570. DOI 10.1197/jamia.M1138. REX M. JAKOBOVITS, PHD, CORNELIUS ROSSE, MD, DSC, JAMES F. BRINKLEY, MD, PHD fessionals to rapidly design and implement their own custom web-based interfaces to biomedical content.1 WIRM enables a nonprogrammer to model domain knowledge as object-oriented schemas, using a menudriven interface. Once schemas are defined, WIRM automatically generates a drill-down web information system for acquiring, querying, navigating, annotating, and editing instances of those schemas. WIRM has been released as an open source toolkit and has been used to build a wide range of applications for clinicians, researchers, and educators. As estimated by the developers, WIRM reduced implementation time for the applications by 50–75% over more traditional approaches. Planned improvements should increase the usability to point that a growing number of medical professionals will be able to create custom applications that improve the efficiency of their research efforts and expand their capacity to share knowledge.