Summary
Objectives To summarize current outstanding research in the field of decision support, knowledge
representation and management.
Method Synopsis of the articles selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2008.
Results Five papers from international peer reviewed journals have been selected for the
section on decision support, knowledge representation and management. They address
a wide range of topics such as the recognition and extraction of negation or time
from clinical narratives, the use of ontological elements to reduce the complexity
of natural language processing applications or to strengthen the precision of document
retrieval as well as the benefits of integrating clinical decision support within
computer provider orderentry.
Conclusions The best paper selection brings to light that whatever the methodological approach
used in decision support, knowledge representation and management, all applications
benefit from manipulating information that is expressed in both a meaningful and structured
way. In order to combine the flexibility and expressive power of natural language
with the computational tractability of structured data, the electronic health record
based on structured narrative offers new perspectives.
Keywords
Natural language processing - knowledge representation - ontologies - information
retrieval - reasoning