A detailed analysis of the Arden Syntax expression grammar

Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Stefan KrausDennis Toddenroth

Abstract

The Arden Syntax for Medical Logic Systems is a standard for encoding and sharing medical knowledge in the form of Medical Logic Modules. To improve accessibility for clinicians, the originators of the standard deliberately designed Arden Syntax expressions to resemble natural language, and parentheses around operands are not generally required. For certain patterns of nested expressions, however, the use of parentheses is mandatory, otherwise they are not accepted by an Arden Syntax environment. In this study, we refer to such patterns as anomalies. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent and the circumstances of such anomalies, and to outline a solution based on an alternative grammar encoding approach. To analyze the distribution of anomalies in nested expressions, we developed two custom-made complementary utilities. The first utility, termed parser, checks a single expression pattern against the specification-compliant grammar for syntactic correctness. The second utility, termed composer, automatically creates an extensive amount of expression patterns by permuting and nesting operators without the use of parentheses, and stores these together with the expected syntactic correctness. By means of these utili...Continue Reading

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