support infrastructure that is needed to support those users. We describe an overview of the requirements for software tools that we have found to be necessary ...
Supporting the use of the GALEN Intermediate Representation W.D. Solomon', J.E. Rogers', A.L. Rectorl, E.J. van der Haring2, P.E. Zanstra2 'Medical Informatics Group, Departent of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK 2Dept. Medical Informatics, Epidemiology and Statistics, University of Nijmegen, NL thirdly, the intermediate representation must be configured so that it can be used to support different kinds of (related) activities. Support for use of the ClaW in classification centres Tigger supports 'meta-authoring': building up a controlled vocabulary for authoring dissections which is presented for use in the ClaW, and providing sufficient information so that the ClaW can translate authored dissections into GRAIL. Tigger is used to harmonise and maintain this vocabulary at a central location (from where it is distributed for use within the classification centres). Support for central harmonisation, maintenance and quality assurance Tigger provides a number of other facilities that are required centrally to support the use of the ClaW: analysis of authored dissections, transformation into a common style, integration, and control of overall progress, scale and scope of the work being done in several national classification centres. Support for other domis Whilst the original purpose of the GALEN intermediate representation was to support the production of surgical procedures, the technique has proved to be applicable and useful in other areas. Tigger provides facilities to configure the intermediate representation for use in different domains; it has been used to support the representation of diseases, and the structure and effect of drugs. This involves managing different controlled vocabularies, as well as the specification for how dissections produced using those vocabularies should be translated into GRAIL.
The GALEN-IN-USE project has developed the use of an "intermediate representation" to support the large-scale structured representation of surgical procedures. This hides a large amount of the complexity of the underlying GRAIL formalism, and scale of the GALEN Common Reference Model from clinical users, and enables them to become highly productive with very little training. However, whilst simplifying the task of the end-users, there has needed to be more complexity in the tools and support infrastructure that is needed to support those users. We describe an overview of the requirements for software tools that we have found to be necessary to support the use of the GALEN intermediate representation. INTRODUCTION Two distinct, though related, sets of tools have been developed during the GALEN-IN-USE project: the Classification Workbench (ClaW) is used by clinical end-users to author representations of the semantic structure of phrases known as 'dissections'). The ClaW then automatically translates dissections into GRAIL and classifies them. With these, and other, mechanisms, the process of classification maintenance and development is supported12. However, the ClaW relies on extra resources, for example to specify how dissections are translated into GRAIL. A separate support tool - Tigger is required to build and maintain these resources, and to harmonise and manage the results of using the ClaW. These support tools are now in routine use to support the use of the GALEN intermediate representation in surgical procedures and diseases within the GALEN-IN-USE project, and to describe drugs and prescribing information within the UK's Prodigy Im project. SUPPORTING THE USE OF THE INTERMEDIATE REPRESENTATION There are three classes of task that must be supported: firstly, users of the ClaW in classification centres require resources which must be supplied and maintained; secondly, the results of their efforts must be harmonised and quality assured, and
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References 1. JE Rogers WD Sdoon AL Pectr P Pe PZstra2 E van der Haring. Ris to Dissections to GRAIL to Fith nenational Congress of the Qasic Is. E eaFeation for Medical Ifr , ME-97
2. FE Zanta, EJ. van der Haring, E Flier, JE.Rogers, WD Sdomn; Using the GRAIL languag for
Cgress of the Eropen Federation for Medica aticS, MIE97 aloiki, Greece
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