Visualizing Complex Process Hierarchies during the Modeling Process

摘要

Clinical practice guidelines are documents that include recommendations describing appropriate care for the management of patients with a specific clinical condition, such as diabetes or chronic heart failure. Several representation languages exist to model these documents in a computer-interpretable and -executable form with the intention of integrating them into clinical information systems. Asbru is one of these representation languages that is able to model the complex hierarchies of these medical processes (called plans in Asbru). To allow their efficient evaluation and manipulation, they must be visualized in a compact and still clear form. This visualization must be integrated into an editing environment which makes changes to the process hierarchy easy and gives immediate feedback on the changes. In this paper, we present a novel visualization, Plan Strips, which represents the hierarchy of plans, i.e., processes, as a set of nested strips. It represents the synchronization of the plans by colour-coding the strips and by the ordering of the strips. This saves considerable space compared to graph representations. The visualization is integrated into an editing environment which allows the immediate modification of the plan hierarchy, but also changes to all other aspects of the plan.