Bridging the Semantic Gap - An Approach based on Observations in Medical Research and Evidence-Based Clinical Practice

Formal medical modeling is the basis for the systematic acquisition and analysis of medical data with the critical goals of reaching informed decisions in treatment and performing meaningful clinical research. While the semantic web provides a promising technology, the user experience of formal modeling remains largely unaddressed. Starting out from the view that evidence and knowledge presentation have a fundamental role in knowledge elicitation, an argument is made that working backwards from the goals which information systems strive to fulfill, the end user applications and the genuine context they provide, towards the underlying formalisms can lead to new and more accessible approaches in formal knowledge modeling.