HCLSIG/Project Ideas/DecisionSupportRuleLanguages
Decision Support Rule Languages
Project Proposal
The most prominent intersection of expert systems and health care information systems is in the area of decision support systems. Rule languages and inference mechanism are a key component to this intersection and the ongoing development of semantic web rule languages could benefit from a closer correspondence with this interest group that could possibly result in the documentation of a handful of real-world clinical guidelines that lend themselves well to being represented as rule languages such as RIF, N3, etc..
Ideas / Thoughts
Medical decision support systems might use rules from pharmaceutical knowledge bases, laboratory knowledge bases, patient databases, and medical ontologies. Rules can be used to express therapeutic recommendations, to formulate queries about relevant prescriptions for a patient, and to assess the effectiveness of a treatment.
A use case for a rule-based Medical Decision Support is developed in the W3C RIF WG and decsribed in the W3C RIF Use Cases and Requirements (W3C RIF UCR) document
http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/UCR#Ruleset_Integration_for_Medical_Decision_Support
A particular reference implementation of this use case is implemented in the Rule Responder HCLS eScience Infrastructure