ACKTUS: A Platform for Developing Personalized Support Systems in the Health Domain

Abstract

This paper presents ACKTUS, a semantic web platform for modeling and managing knowledge integrated in support systems for health care, and for designing the interaction with the end user applications. A key purpose is to allow the domain experts to collaboratively model the knowledge content and tailor interaction to users. Therefore, the development has been done in a process of participatory action research where domain experts have contributed to the design and re-design of ACKTUS while they have been modeling the content and behavior of end-user applications. The ontology that serves as the knowledge structure in the system integrates the user model, modality values, clinical practice guidelines and preferences, in the form of schemes and scheme-nodes (arguments) in an argumentation framework, partly by integrating the argument interchange format. User studies have shown that ACKTUS can be used for the intended purpose by domain professionals not familiar with knowledge engineering tasks. Moreover, the platform functions as a research infrastructure for health researchers in their development and evaluation of new ICT-based interventions targeting improved health.