Summary
Objectives: Data and information in medicine are mainly represented in slightly structured or
even unstructured, narrative text documents. It is nearly impossible to detect and
handle relationships between data elements within narrative documents or to retrieve
parts of documents that contain specific information. But information access and retrieval
are essential to serve the delivery and application of evidence-based medicine.
Methods: The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) provides a standard means to explicitly describe
a document‘s structure and to identify meaningful elements inside textual narrations.
Information about the state-of-the-art medical care can be delivered to the physician
by different means and media. Clinical practice guidelines are thought to be one possible
solution to summarize and present current medical evidence.
Results: The structuring of resources containing medical information with XML can facilitate
the provision of problem-specific medical information at the point of care by improving
content retrieval and presentation. In our project, the XML Schema is used for the
electronic representation in order to structure guidelines (and other text-based resources)
in a standardized way.
Conclusion: The transition from unstructured textual data towards structured and coded data will
be a migration process. One of the premises of our approach is that the structure
that is defined by the information model doesn‘t restrict the content of the documents.
This approach may fill the gap between computerized, algorithmic guideline recommendations
and text-based guideline distributions.
Keywords
XML - clinical practice guidelines - schema - modeling
