Developing an ontology for representing knowledge in evidence-based medicine.

Abstract

The practice of Evidence-Based medicine (EBM) has been strongly advocated in today's field of medicine. It marks a new paradigm shift for medical practice, by directing clinical decision-making towards examinations of evidence from clinical researches and drives patient safety and quality care. The practice of EBM has however been limited by two factors: lack of physicians' knowledge on EBM principles and difficulty in retrieving quality research information. The lack of an existing knowledge representation for EBM further accentuates these limiting factor. A EBM-Practice ontology is being developed to model the knowledge required for the evaluation and application of EBM such that evidence in clinical research literature can be represented adequately and subsequently deployable in information systems for better retrieval.