The Web Ontology Language (OWL) based clinical guideline system is a kind of clinical decision support system which is often used to assist health professionals to find clinical recommendations from the guidelines and check clinical compliance issues in terms of the guideline recommendations. However, due to some limitations of the current OWL language constructs, temporal knowledge contained in various knowledge domains cannot be directly represented in OWL. As a result, the representation, query and reasoning of temporal knowledge are largely ignored in many OWL-based clinical guideline ontology systems. The aim of this research is to investigate a temporal knowledge modelling method namely “4D fluent” and extend it to represent the temporal constraints contained in clinical guideline recommendations within OWL language constructs. The extended 4D fluent method can model temporal constraints including valid calendar time, interval, duration, repetitive or cyclical temporal constraints and temporal relations such that it can enable reasoning over these temporal constraints in the OWL-based clinical guideline ontology system and overcome the shortcoming of the traditional OWL-based clinical guideline system to an extent.
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