EFFECTIVE DOMAIN-DEPENDENT REUSE IN MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE BASES

Knowledge reuse is now a critical issue for most developers of medical knowledge-based systems. As a rule, reuse is addressed from an ambiti ous, knowledge-engineering perspective that focuses on reusable genera l purpose knowledge modules, concepts, and methods. However, such a ge neral goal fails to take into account the specific aspects of medical practice. From the point of view of the knowledge engineer, whose goal is to capture the specific features and intricacies of a given domain , this approach addresses the wrong level of generality. In this paper , we adopt a more pragmatic viewpoint, introducing the less ambitious goal of ''domain-dependent limited reuse'' and suggesting effective me ans of achieving it in practice. In a knowledge representation framewo rk combining objects and production rules, we propose three mechanisms emerging from the combination of object-oriented programming and rule -based programming. We show these mechanisms contribute to achieve lim ited reuse and to introduce useful limited variations in medical exper tise. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.