The CliniCon framework for context representation in electronic patient records

A well-known problem of current electronic patient records in that they usually fail to represent the semantic relationships between the involved clinical data. This has to be viewed as a problem especially in the domains characterized by a complex and long-term treatment, as the medical decision making process may not be comprehensible anymore from the data entries themselves. Context representation can overcome these limitations, enabling the record to express causality, revisions, conflicts, or individual heuristics explicitly. This article introduces CLINICON which is a formal framework for domain-independent context representation based on Sowa's conceptual graphs.