Formalizing ‘Living Guidelines' Using LASSIE: A Multi-step Information Extraction Method.

Living guidelines are documents presenting up-to-date and state-of-the-art knowledge to practitioners. To have guidelines implemented by computer-support they firstly have to be formalized in a computer-interpretable form. Due to the complexity of such formats the formalization process is challenging, but burdensome and time-consuming. The LASSIE methodology supports this task by formalizing guidelines in several steps from the textual form to the guideline representation language Asbru using a document-centric approach. LASSIE uses Information Extraction technique to semi-automatically accomplish these steps. We apply LASSIE to support the implementation of living guidelines. Based on a living guideline published by the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) we show that adaptations of previously formalized guidelines can be accomplished easily and fast. By using this new approach only new and changed text parts have to be modeled. Furthermore, models can be inherited from previously modeled guideline versions that were added by domain experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]