Form Follows Function: Model−Driven Engineering for Clinical Trials

Conference item

For certain constrained domains,elaborate model transformation technologies - implemented from scratch in general-purpose programming languages - are unnecessary for model-driven engineering; instead, lightweight configuration of commercial off-the-shelf productivity tools suffices. In this paper, we consider the generation of software tools to support clinical trials. A domain metamodel captures the community's best practice in trial design. A scientist authors a trial protocol, modelling their trial by instantiating the metamodel; customized software artifacts to support trial execution are generated automatically from the scientist's model. The metamodel is expressed as an XML Schema, in such a way that it can be instantiated by completing a form to generate a conformant XML document. The same process works at a second level for trial execution: among the artifacts generated from the protocol are models of the data to be collected, and observations are reported by completing a form to create a conformant XML document. Simple standard form management tools are all that is needed.

Authors: Davies, J; Gibbons, J; Calinescu, R; Crichton, C; Harris, S

• Publisher: Springer
• Host title: International Symposium on Foundations of Health Information Engineering and Systems
• Volume: 7151
• Publication date: 2011-08-01
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-32355-3_2