Clinical guideline knowledge bases form the core of guideline-based clinical care systems. Building such knowledge bases is a complex task involving a team of knowledge engineers and domain experts. We have developed Kwiz, a knowledge-acquisition framework that provides intelligent guidance through the encoding process, and promotes reuse of previously encoded knowledge. Kwiz is built upon Protégé-2000, a general-purpose knowledge acquisition tool, and incorporates some of the salient features in other encoding tools that we identified through a survey. Using Kwiz, we have built clinical guideline workbenches for SAGE and PRODIGY guideline projects. The two workbenches demonstrate how the Kwiz framework can be used to manage the complexity and improve the efficiency in knowledge acquisition.
