Infobutton

The Context-Aware Knowledge Retrieval (Infobutton) specifications provide a standard mechanism for clinical information systems to request context-specific clinical knowledge from online resources.

The Infobutton Project consists of three specifications that are available on the HL7 Web site:

• Knowledge Request Reference Information Model

• URL-based Implementation Guide

• SOA-based Implementation Guide

The content below includes additional guidance that is not part of the official specification.

Hierarchical structure in knowledge response

According to the SOA-based Implementation Guide, the knowledge response payload is based on the IETF Atom Standard. Atom responses include a content feed and one or more content entries. Atom entries can be used to represent multiple documents or document sections returned from a content resource. The SOA-based Implementation Guide includes examples and guidance on representing multiple documents, but not how to represent multiple documents with their subsections as Atom entries. The instructions below explain how to do this in Atom.

• Both documents and their subsections should have their respective entries.

• Document and subsection entries are represented at the same level in the Atom feed. Therefore, Atom provides a "flat" physical representation, even though subsections are components of a document.

• The document-subsection hierarchy is represented through associations' between entries through the Atom:source tag. Specifically, subsections entries include an Atom:source element that includes a pointer to the entry that represents the parent document.

In the example below, a document from MedlinePlus on Asthma includes two subsections on asthma treatment and asthma diagnosis. The Atom feed would include one entry for the Asthma document itself and two other entries for each subsection. The subsection entries have a source tag whose id tag refers to the id of the parent asthma document. The relevant nodes are highlighted:

<feed xml:base="http://apps.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/services/" 
xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom”>
    <title type="text">MedlinePlus Connect</title>
    <author>
      <name>U.S. National Library of Medicine</name>
      <uri>http://www.nlm.nih.gov</uri>
    </author>
    <updated>2014-09-17T08:09:39Z</updated>
    <category scheme="mainSearchCriteria.v.c" term="195967001"/>
    <category scheme="mainSearchCriteria.v.cs" term="2.16.840.1.113883.6.96"/>

<!-- Document-level entry - Asthma document -->
    <entry>
      <title>Asthma</title>
      <link href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/asthma.html" rel="alternate"/>
      <id>tag: nlm.nih.gov, 2014-17-09:/medlineplus/asthma.html</id>
      <updated>2014-09-17T08:09:39Z</updated>
    </entry>

<!-- Section-level entry - Asthma treatment. The source tag refers to the document-level entry above-->
  <entry>
      <source>
         <title>Asthma</title>
         <link href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/asthma.html" rel="alternate"/>
         <id>tag: nlm.nih.gov, 2014-17-09:/medlineplus/asthma.html</id>
      </source>
      <title>Asthma treatment</title>
      <link href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/asthma.html#treatment" rel="alternate"/>
      <id>tag: nlm.nih.gov, 2014-17-09:/medlineplus/asthma.html/treatment</id>
      <updated>2014-09-17T08:09:39Z</updated>
    </entry>

<!-- Section-level entry - Asthma diagnosis. -->
    <entry>
      <source>
         <title>Asthma</title>
         <link href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/asthma.html" rel="alternate"/>
         <id>tag: nlm.nih.gov, 2014-17-09:/medlineplus/asthma.html</id>
       </source>
      <title>Asthma diagnosis</title>
      <link href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/asthma.html#diagnosis" rel="alternate"/>
      <id>tag: nlm.nih.gov, 2014-17-09:/medlineplus/asthma.html/diagnosis</id>
      <updated>2014-09-17T08:09:39Z</updated>
    </entry>
  </feed>