KBExplorator and KBExpertLib as the Tools for Building Medical Decision Support Systems

Medicine had been considered a good domain in which the concepts of rule-based decision support system could be applied. The early medical decision support systems were designed over forty years ago. Since that time, many different methods were proposed in the decision support area. Regardless of the development of different non knowledge-based methods, the rule representation and inference on the rules bases are still popular. In this paper the KBExplorator system and KBExpertLib software library are introduced in the context of medical decision support system implementation. The KBExplorator system may be considered as tool for building medical knowledge bases. This system is designed for knowledge engineers and domain experts, which are responsible for creating the knowledge base for particular problem. The software library KBExpertLib is a tool for programmers to develop software which utilize the knowledge bases designed with use of KBExplorator. The main properties and methods of practical usage of KBExplorator and KBExpertLib are described as well as experiments focused on the software effectiveness evaluation.