Tools for Acquiring Clinical Guidelines in Asbru

In order for clinical guidelines to be verified, they must first be acquired or at least translated into a format that can be treated formally. Most guidelines today either exist as plain text, tables, or flow-charts. We present two tools that support this translation: The Guideline Markup Tool (GMT) and the Pontifex Intelligent XML Editor Extension (PIXEE). The GMT provides a relatively easy way to translate free text into Asbru. It does this by displaying both the original text and the translation, and showing the user which parts of the Asbru code correspond to which elements of the original text. This not only makes it easier to author plans, but also to understand the resulting Asbru constructs in terms of the original guideline. PIXEE is a more general XML editor that has some special features due to a richer representation of the language than pure XML. It provides means to aggregate information dynamically and also to more effectively work with language constructs. Both these tools make the translation into a formal language easier and therefore enable us to formally verify guidelines, thus reducing errors and ambiguities in them.

Robert Kosara, Silvia Miksch, Andreas Seyfang, Peter Votruba, Tools for Acquiring Clinical Guidelines in Asbru, Proceedings of the Sixth World Conference on Integrated Design and Process Technology (IDPT), 2002.

@inproceedings{Kosara:IDPT:2002,
	year = 2002,
	title = {Tools for Acquiring Clinical Guidelines in Asbru}, 
	author = {Robert Kosara and Silvia Miksch and Andreas Seyfang and Peter Votruba}, 
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth World Conference on Integrated Design and Process Technology (IDPT)}, 
	abstract = {In order for clinical guidelines to be verified, they must first be acquired or at least translated into a format that can be treated formally. Most guidelines today either exist as plain text, tables, or flow-charts. We present two tools that support this translation: The Guideline Markup Tool (GMT) and the Pontifex Intelligent XML Editor Extension (PIXEE). The GMT provides a relatively easy way to translate free text into Asbru. It does this by displaying both the original text and the translation, and showing the user which parts of the Asbru code correspond to which elements of the original text. This not only makes it easier to author plans, but also to understand the resulting Asbru constructs in terms of the original guideline. PIXEE is a more general XML editor that has some special features due to a richer representation of the language than pure XML. It provides means to aggregate information dynamically and also to more effectively work with language constructs. Both these tools make the translation into a formal language easier and therefore enable us to formally verify guidelines, thus reducing errors and ambiguities in them.}, 
}