Generating a Document- Oriented View of a Protégé Knowledge Base

A frame-based knowledge base can be a very large network whose information content is difficult for developers and users to comprehend and manipulate. In the SAGE consortium that is creating the technological infrastructure required in developing enterprise clinical decision-support systems for guideline-based care, knowledge engineers and clinicians must collaborate to develop knowledge bases of computable clinical practice guidelines. To facilitate communication among project members, we created a method to annotate a Protégé ontology and use the annotations to export an XML version of the Protégé knowledge base that can be transformed into a readable document. We demonstrated the generality of the method by applying it to other Protégé knowledge bases such as those developed by the PRODIGY guideline projects.