Database and knowledge base integration in decision support systems

Since decision support systems (DSS) in medicine often are linked to clinical databases it is important to find methods that facilitate the work for DSS developers to implement database queries in the knowledge base (KB). This paper presents a method for linking clinical databases to a KB with Arden Syntax modules. The method is based on a query meta database including templates for SQL queries. During knowledge module authoring the medical expert only refers to a code in the query meta database. Our method uses standard tools so it can be implemented on different platforms and linked to different clinical databases.