Application of a configurable keywords-based query language to the healthcare domain

Organizations tend to gather information more and more rapidly nowadays. The increase in the volume of this information is exponential. For it to be used efficiently, it is imperative to have a means for extracting valuable knowledge from the vast amount of provided information. The extraction of knowledge is considered the central part of a successful organization. Such an extraction must be done quickly and efficiently in order for this knowledge to be put in use at once. This paper addresses the problem of how this extraction of knowledge can be done conveniently without obtaining specific and in-depth skills in information technology so that it could be done by domain experts directly. The paper inspects the domain of hospital management with the domain experts being hospital managers and physicians who need to make decisions that would be based on facts gained from the information located in the database of the hospital. The system described in this paper lets users formulating their queries in the natural language, and it translated those queries in the language understood by the underlying database. Our case studies suggest that such type of querying might provide a noticeable improvement in the decision-making process of healthcare professionals.