Healthcare knowledge acquisition: an ontology-based approach using the extensible markup language (XML)

The healthcare enterprise requires a great deal of knowledge to maintain premium efficiency in the delivery of quality healthcare. We employ Knowledge Management based knowledge acquisition strategies to procure 'tacit' healthcare knowledge from experienced healthcare practitioners. Situational, problem-specific Scenarios are proposed as viable knowledge acquisition and representation constructs. We present a healthcare Tacit Knowledge Acquisition Info-structure (TKAI) that allows remote healthcare practitioners to record their tacit knowledge. TKAI employs (a) ontologies for standardisation of tacit knowledge and (b) XML to represent scenario instances for their transfer over the Internet to the server-side Scenario-Base and for the global sharing of acquired tacit healthcare knowledge.