Modelling virtual patients and generating feedback using semantic web technologies

Abstract

A variety of computer programs called virtual patients systems are available today. Virtual patients are designed to emulate realistic clinical cases on a computer, and help students to practice diagnosis and clinical reasoning. They are used as an integral part of the curriculum in many medical schools. However, the technologies currently used to build virtual patients present limitations. Feedback has to be edited manually by medical experts, and the feedback provided is often not adapted to each student's interactions with the virtual patient. This makes creating and editing a virtual patient time-consuming, and limits its pedagogical impact. This presentation demonstrates research on automatic feedback generation for virtual patients, using a group of methods and technologies collectively known as the semantic web. The semantic web is designed to formally represent information about digital documents and other resources (such as people and events) using RDF (Resources Description Framework). It is also possible to describe concepts, classify them and define their properties using OWL (Web Ontology Language). These formal languages also allow re-use of data from external sources from the web. To generate feedback, an adequate computer model has to be designed to represent virtual patients and students’ interactions. The semantic web allows rich data modelling, and is therefore superior to traditional data technologies such as relational databases and XML for this purpose.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mark Weal: orcid.org/0000-0001-6251-8786

ORCID for Hugh Davis: orcid.org/0000-0002-1182-1459

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