Repertory hypergrids: an application to clinical practice guidelines

Creation and maintenance of links in large hypermedia documents is difficult. Motivated by an application to a federal clinical practice guideline for cancer pain management, we have developed and evaluated a repertory grid-based linking scheme we call repertory hypergrids. Harnessing established knowledge acquisition techniques, the repertory hypergrid assigns each “knowledge chunk” a location in “context space”. A chunk links to another chunk if they are both close in context space. To evaluate the scheme, we conducted a protocol analysis. Six users of the guideline addressing typical cancer pain management tasks made 30 explicit links. The repertory hypergrid using a neighborhood size of 16 captures 24 of these links. With optimization, the repertory hypergrid captures 27 of the links with a neighborhood size of 13.