Managing proposals and evaluations of updates to medical knowledge: Theory and applications

The process of keeping up-to-date the medical knowledge stored in relational databases is of paramount importance. Since quality and reliability of medical knowledge are essential, in many cases physicians’ proposals of updates must undergo experts’ evaluation before possibly becoming effective. However, until now no theoretical framework has been provided in order to cope with this phenomenon in a principled and non-ad hoc way. Indeed, such a framework is important not only in the medical domain, but in all Wikipedia-like contexts in which evaluation of update proposals is required. In this paper we propose GPVM (General Proposal Vetting Model), a general model to cope with update proposal⧹evaluation in relational databases. GPVM extends the current theory of temporal relational databases and, in particular, BCDM – Bitemporal Conceptual Data Model – “consensus” model, providing a new data model, new operations to propose and accept⧹reject updates, and new algebraic operators to query proposals. The properties of GPVM are also studied. In particular, GPVM is a consistent extension of BCDM and it is reducible to it.These properties ensure consistency with most relational temporal database frameworks, facilitating implementation on top of current frameworks and interoperability with previous approaches.

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► Framework for cooperative updates and evaluation of temporal clinical data.
► Proposers issues set of updates to be evaluated (accepted/rejected) by experts.
► New temporal relational data model, temporal algebra and proposer/evaluator operations.
► Formal and domain-independent extension of current relational temporal database theory.
► Consistency and reducibility to BCDM grants interoperability and implementability.