Annotating Evidence Based Clinical Guidelines: A Lightweight Ontology

This paper describes a lightweight ontology for representing annotations of declarative evidence based clinical guidelines. We present the motivation and requirements for this representation, based on an analysis of several guidelines. The ontology provides the means to connect clinical questions and associated recommendations to underlying evidence, and can capture strength and quality of recommendations and evidence, respectively. The ontology was applied in the conversion of manual annotations to RDF and used as part of a prototype clinical decision support system