A development environment for knowledge-based medical applications on the world-wide web

The World-Wide Web (WWW) is increasingly being used as a platform to develop distributed applications, particularly in contexts, such as medical ones, where high usability and availability are required. In this paper we propose a methodology for the development of knowledge-based medical applications on the web, based on the use of an explicit domain ontology to automatically generate parts of the system. We describe a development environment, centred on the LISPWEB Common Lisp HTTP server, that supports this methodology, and we show how it facilitates the creation of complex web-based applications, by overcoming the limitations that normally affect the adequacy of the web for this purpose. Finally, we present an outline of a system for the management of diabetic patients built using the LISPWEB environment.