Software applications supporting clinical trial planning and monitoring have significant requirements for knowledge management. Modeling the timing of various clinical trial activities is central to these requirements. Often, the encoded temporal patterns found in clinical trial applications may be imprecise and partial reflections of the intentions of the trial designers. To address this problem, we have developed an end-to-end knowledge-based system that permits formal design-time specification of temporal patterns and their automated verification when the system is deployed at clinical trial sites. In this paper, we discuss the use of the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) as a general, reusable mechanism for encoding and executing these temporal pat-terns on relational databases. We present a set of ontologies and tools that we have developed for these efforts. We show how our approach sup-ports participant and specimen tracking applications for clinical trials undertaken by the Immune Tolerance Network.
