Guideline Markup Tool

Software downloads

Guideline Markup Tool (GMT)

developed by

keywords

Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology

Knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, clinical guidelines, validation, verification, maintenance, XML, Asbru

status

Download details

Under continued development. Current version available for research and evaluation purposes.

*** GMT introduction and download ***

description

The GMT facilitates the translation of clinical guideline documents into a formal representation in XML (see references below).

" The Guideline Markup Tool (GMT) provides a relatively easy way to translate free text into Asbru. It does this by displaying both the original text and the translation, and showing the user which parts of the Asbru code correspond to which elements of the original text. This not only makes it easier to author plans, but also to understand the resulting Asbru constructs in terms of the original guideline. " [ASGAARD project, Vienna University of Technology]

references

Votruba P, Miksch S, Seyfang A, Kosara R. Tracing the formalization steps of textual guidelines. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2004;101:172-6.

[PubMed] []

" This paper presents a new guideline authoring tool, called Guideline Markup Tool (GMT). It proposes two useful features, which are missing in existing tools. First, it facilitates the translation of a free-text guideline into a formal representation, providing special XML macros. Second, it can be used to create links between the original guideline and its formal representation. Therefore, the GMT eases the implementation of clinical guidelines in a formal representation, which can be used in monitoring and therapy planning systems. "

Votruba P, Miksch S, Kosara R. Facilitating knowledge maintenance of clinical guidelines and protocols. Medinfo. 2004;2004:57-61.

[PubMed] []

" Clinical protocols and guidelines are widely used in the medical domain to improve disease management techniques. Different software systems are in development to support the de-sign and the execution of such guidelines. The bottleneck in the guideline software developing process is the transforma-tion of the text-based clinical guidelines into a formal repre-sentation, which can be used by the execution software. This paper introduces a method and a tool that was designed to provide a solution for that bottleneck. The so-called Guideline Markup Tool (GMT) facilitates the translation of guidelines into a formal representation written in XML. This tool enables the protocol designer to create links between the original guideline and its formal representation and ease the editing of guidelines applying design patterns in the form of macros. The usefulness of our approach is illustrated using GMT to edit Asbru protocols. We performed a usability study with eight participants to examine the usefulness of the GMT and of the Asbru macros, which showed that the proposed approach is very appropriate to author and maintain clinical guidelines. "

contact

links

Peter Votruba
peter@asgaard.tuwien.ac.at

Silvia Miksch
silvia@asgaard.tuwien.ac.at

Further information on the GMT by Peter Votruba bullet

ASGAARD project (including Asbru) bullet

Asbru [OC]

Acknowledgement

ASGAARD project, Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology

Entry on OpenClinical: 20 October 2004
Last main update: 20 October 2004; (06 April 2005)

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