The Musen Lab

Mark Musen’s laboratory concentrates on the study of components for building knowledge-based systems, controlled terminologies and ontologies, and technology for the Semantic Web. For two decades, Musen’s group has worked to elucidate reusable building block of intelligent systems, and to develop scalable computational architectures for systems that can address significant application tasks in biomedicine. An important element of that work has led to the development of the Protégé system, an open-source platform used around the world for the construction and maintenance of electronic knowledge bases, ontologies, and Semantic Web applications. Protégé provides a platform from which to study problems in knowledge modeling, ontology integration and alignment, and the construction of large-scale and distributed intelligent systems.

Work in Musen’s laboratory is motivated by a variety of application problems in biomedicine. Considerable attention has been placed on the use of intelligent systems to assist protocol-based clinical care. From the original EON system for guideline-based therapy, the group has collaborated with Prof. Mary Goldstein to build ATHENA DSS, a advice system to aid in the care of patients with hypertension, now installed at several Veterans Affairs medical centers. Work on EON greatly influenced the PRODIGY system in the United Kingdom as well as the GLIF guideline model and SAGE project in the United States.

Other research concerns the use of knowledge-based data integration and analysis techniques for bioterrorism surveillance and for reasoning about human anatomy and potential anatomic injuries.