Mark Musen

The construction of automated systems to assist biomedical decision making is impeded by difficulties in formalizing knowledge and in encoding that knowledge for use by the computer. Current work in our laboratory addresses mechanisms by which computers can assist in the development and use of large, electronic biomedical knowledge bases. Emphasis is placed on new methods for the automated generation of computer-based tools that end-users can use to enter knowledge of specific biomedical content. In particular, we are studying:

• Development of reusable ontologies and problem-solving methods
• Engineering methods for building and managing ontology libraries
• Automated generation of knowledge-acquisition tools from domain ontologies
• Visual metaphors to facilitate knowledge entry by application specialists
• Decision-support systems for protocol-based care and other tasks within biomedicine
• Representation of biomedical concepts and terminologies for development of intelligent systems