Formalising and Acquiring Model-based Hypertext in Medicine -- an Integrative Approach

Combining a knowledge acquisition methodology with a powerful data model we present an approach to the acquisition, maintenance and browsing of scientific medical hypertext. The hypergraph-based data model supports the consistent treatment of cyclic data structures, the nesting of complex object and comes with an elegant way of path-declaration in order to represent time-dependent medical processes or large hypertext-tours. It encourages a stepwise schema design and therefore supports a spiral shape acquisition process. We formally define view mechanisms on the basis of a rule based query and modification language. The views enable a context sensitive presentation of medical knowledge according to the informational needs of the physician. Our approach has been applied to the implementation of an authoring and tutoring environment for a computer-based hypermedia reference book for cerebrovascular diseases (NeuroN). During the acquisition process the expressive power and the flexibility of the representational formats have been evaluated