A pragmatic implementation of medical temporal reasoning for clinical medicine

In most development tools for knowledge-based systems object-property-value-triples are the basic ontological representation. We have extended this approach for temporal reasoning by replacing the values with time-objects. A time-object is a combination of a value with a time-point or a time-interval. By preserving the object-property-value-triples basic artificial intelligence techniques can be applied without modifications in the temporal case. The greater complexity of temporal inferences is compensated by a blackboard control architecture enabling small knowledge-sources. The control of the strategic reasoning is in accordance with the select and test model. A prototype of a knowledge-based advisor for the acute radiation syndrome has been implemented and partially evaluated. Due to the affected proliferative tissues it is a strongly time-oriented medical domain.