Temporal consistency checking in clinical guidelines acquisition and execution: the GLARE's approach.

GLARE (GuideLine Acquisition, Representation and Execution) is a domain-independent system for the acquisition, representation and execution of clinical guidelines. Temporal constraints play an important role within clinical guidelines (e.g. to specify therapies). The treatment of such constraints is one of the distinguishing features of GLARE. During acquisition, GLARE supports (i) the representation and (ii) the check of the consistency of the temporal constraints. Moreover, it (iii) automatically checks that the times of execution of specific actions respect the general temporal constraints described in the guideline. Such a treatment of temporal constraints involves the extension of various Artificial Intelligence techniques.