A Multiple-Ontology Customizable Search 

Interface for Retrieval of Clinical Practice Guidelines

Robert Moskovitch and Yuval Shahar

Medical Informatics Research CenterDepartment of Information Systems Engineering

Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel

DeGeL – Digital electronic Guidelines Library

The Digital electronic Guideline Library (DeGeL): Guideline

Indexing • The DeGeL repository includes two entity types:

– Source Guidelines (SGLs)– Marked-Up Guidelines (MGLs)

• MGLs may be represented in different ontologies (e.g., Asbru, GEM)

• Guidelines are classified along 7 semantic axes (indices) (e.g., disorders, therapy, diagnostic findings)

• The semantic axes, the free text and the structuring created by the markup process are used by a guideline-specific search engine, Vaidurya

DeGeL – Digital electronic Guidelines Library

The Vaidurya Customizable Query Interface

• The Current interface is overloaded

• Different users have– different information needs, – different levels of familiarity with DeGeL– different levels of clinical knowledge

DeGeL – Digital electronic Guidelines Library

The current interface

DeGeL – Digital electronic Guidelines Library

Simple search

DeGeL – Digital electronic Guidelines Library

Advanced Search

DeGeL – Digital electronic Guidelines Library

Our Solution

• Each user can customize her own interface, which is a collection of the requested ontology elements and semantic indices.

• Other users will be able to use the customized interfaces as well.

DeGeL – Digital electronic Guidelines Library

Creation of a Customized Query Interface

DeGeL – Digital electronic Guidelines Library

A VCQI example

DeGeL – Digital electronic Guidelines Library

VisiGuide