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M. A. Musen
Scalable Software Architectures for Decision Support
Keywords: Scalable Software Architectures, Decision Support, Software Engineering, Ontologies, Problem Solving
Interest in decision-support programs for clinical medicine soared in the 1970s. Since that time, workers in medical informatics have been particularly attracted to rule-based systems as a means of providing clinical decision support. Although developers have built many successful applications using production rules, they also have discovered that creation and maintenance of large rule bases is quite problematic. In the 1980s, several groups of investigators began to explore alternative programming abstractions that can be used to build decision-support systems. As a result, the notions of generic tasks and of reusable problem-solving methods became extremely influential. By the 1990s, academic centers were experimenting with architectures for intelligent systems based on two classes of reusable components: (1) problem-solving methods domain-independent algorithms for automating stereotypical tasks and (2) domain ontologies that captured the essential concepts (and relationships among those concepts) in particular application areas. This paper highlights how developers can construct large, maintainable decision-support systems using these kinds of building blocks. The creation of domain ontologies and problem-solving methods is the fundamental end product of basic research in medical informatics. Consequently, these concepts need more attention by our scientific community.
Methods of Information in Medicine, Schattauer
Print ISSN: 0026-1270
Volume: 38, 12/1999
Pages: 229 - 238