Medicine and health care are currently faced with a significant rise in their complexity. This is partly due to the progress made during the past three decades in the fundamental biological understanding of the causes of health and disease at the molecular, (sub)cellular, and organ level. Since the end of the 1970s, when knowledge representation and reasoning in the biomedical field became a separate area of research, huge progress has been made in the development of methods and tools that are finally able to impact on the way medicine is being practiced.

Even though there...