Exploiting OWL reasoning services to execute ontologically-modeled clinical practice guidelines

Ontology-based modeling of Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) is a well-established approach to computerize CPG for execution in clinical decision support systems. Many CPG computerization approaches use the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to represent the CPG's knowledge, but they do not exploit its reasoning services to execute the CPG. In this paper, we present our CPG execution approach that leverages OWL reasoning services to execute CPG. In this way, both CPG knowledge representation and execution semantics are maintained within the same formalism. We have developed three different OWL-based CPG execution engines using OWL-DL, OWL 2 and SWRL. We evaluate the efficacy of our execution engines by executing an existing OWL based CPG. We also present a comparison of the execution capabilities of our three CPG execution engines.