Question Pattern

Here’s a link to a example of the question pattern submitted by Piotr Nowara. It contains a solution for representing the propositional (yes/no) questions:

http://question-modeling.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/simple_decision_example.owl

Scenario

STAGE 1. A patient is diagnosed with a bacterial throat infection. The doctor needs to decide what treatment would be most appropriate. In order to prescribe the right drug, the doctor has to know whether or not the patient has an allergy for the drugs being considered for prescription and some parameters to evaluate correct dosing rules. STAGE 2. Patient P1 returns with some symptoms of allergic reaction, which suggests that P1 rather has allergy for Penicillin. The doctor decides to prescribe the other antibiotic.

Issues

While working on this simple scenario some interesting issues came out:

1) continuity/identity of decision-making process - it may be hard to tell when one decision-making ends and the other begins. Like in the scenario above: is it a single decision-making process or two distinct ones connected with the each other by the same patient they both concern? Defining the criteria for identity (or continuity) of the decision-making might be something very interesting to do but I don’t think we should deal with that problem right now. The case could become even more complicated wen dealing with subdecisions and decision-processes with changing participants. it seems to me we should (at least for now) leave that issue open and prepare standard proposition enabling various interpretation.

2) decision <> decision-making - there is a fundamental ontological difference between the process of deciding and its outcome - a decision. Moreover, allowing more elastic boundaries of decision-making (see above) can result in single decision-making having more than one decision as its outcome.

3) decision as an answer - our starting point is a question/problem initiating the decision-making, the consequence is that the output of the decision-making process is an answer. My example includes a decision as a defined class. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to analyze the possible consequences.

4) incomplete decision-making stages - in some cases it may be useful to record a decision-making stage even if it doesn’t have any decision as its outcome. For example a patient may be ordered some further tests which may last a couple of days in which some other crucial parameters of decision-making can change resulting in a new stage of the deciding process (the newly recognized facts may be encouragement to continue modelling with a new stage of decision-making)

5) representing changes - this is a general methodological issue, that still implies many discussions. Some of these discussions involve well-known ontology experts unable to find a reasonable consensus. The main problem is: how to represent the mutable entities or the change of their properties in an ontology? What I did in my example is using OWL individuals to represent the same person in different stages of the decision-making process. What would be needed in a real-life application is to add some property which could allow the unambiguous reference to a person (for example insurance number). This is necessary because during decision-making one would often ascribe different or even contradict attributes at different stages of the process. Additional benefit: using different instances to provide “snapshot” view of reality allows developing fine-grained view of the reality - consider an example from my scenario: the throat infection diagnosed at t1 is represented by different OWL individual than the same kind of infection diagnosed at t2 (after the allergic reaction), which illustrates that the medical disorder has probably undergone some change and may require a different treatment.