AN INTERNET-BASED ONTOLOGY EDITOR FOR MEDICAL APPROPRIATENESS CRITERIA

Appropriateness criteria and practice guidelines seek to promote the c ost-effectiveness use of medical interventions, and can be most useful when integrated with computer-based patient records and order-entry s ystems. Building an abstract model (ontology) of appropriateness crite ria can require considerable effort among investigators at geographica lly dispersed institutions. To facilitate the construction and mainten ance of ontologies for clinical appropriateness criteria, the author d eveloped an Internet-based system for viewing and editing the knowledg e model. The system, called NEON (Network-based Editor for ONtologies) , uses the World Wide Web as a platform-independent user interface. NE ON allows users to edit the indexing terms and the semantic network th at form the ontology for a set of appropriateness criteria. Ontologies built using the system can be imported and exported using an open, in ternationally standardized format based on the Standard Generalized Ma rkup Language (SGML). (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All right s reserved.