Logic engineering for knowledge engineering: design and implementation of the Oxford System of Medicine

摘要

The Oxford System of Medicine project aims to develop a comprehensive information management and decision support system (DSS) for general practitioners. The nature of general medical practice means that such a system must eventually embody knowledge of a large proportion of contemporary medicine, support a range of information management tasks (document retrieval and search, database retrieval and patient record management) and decision making activities (including diagnosis, treatment, investigation, risk assessment and referral), and provide these services within a versatile and extensible package. The present implementation demonstrates a number of the required capabilities. The project offers an opportunity to investigate practical and theoretical issues of large scale knowledge-based systems. To meet requirements for scale, flexibility and soundness we believe that a logic engineering approach has many advantages. The paper describes the logic engineering techniques which are being used, provides a progress report on the design of the OSM, and outlines some current research and expected future developments.