A computer-interpretable guideline knowledge base can be a very large network whose information content is difficult for developers and clinicians to comprehend and review. We created a method to annotate a guideline model and use the annotations to export the guideline knowledge base in an XML format that can be transformed into a readable document. We applied this method to knowledge bases developed in three different guideline modeling projects to analyze uses and limitations of this approach. We demonstrate the promise of creating such document-oriented views, but conclude that guideline models and knowledge bases should be constructed with the goal of creating such human-comprehensible views from the beginning
