Knowledge engineering lifecycle

OpenClinical.net supports the creation and maintenance of a repository of knowledge-based clinical services, and a web server for delivering decision support, workflow and other services to the point of care. The Tallis authoring suite used by OpenClinical supports an integrated development environment, execution engine and a web client. The authoring system can download applications and reusable components from a central repository for local adaptation. The figure below shows the lifecycle model we are currently using. This model is a combination of an orthodox medical publishing model, based on standard techniques for electronic submission, peer review and editorial assessment, and techniques from software engineering such as automatic verification.

The concept of executable knowledge content raises significant new questions to do with the development and maintenance lifecycle. For example, this type of content incorporates executable software as well as electronic documents, so requires software engineering as well as traditional editorial disciplines. The development and support of a hybrid lifecycle model for the development of high quality and safe clinical services is an important goal of OpenClinical.net. An important challenge will be to extend existing lifecycle models from the forward channel of translating the results of medical research into practical tools for supporting clinicians in their to include a feedback channel by which the experience and results acquired from using these tools can be usefully fed back to the research community.