A cooperative methodology to build conceptual models in medicine.

We designed a methodology to perform distribute activities on conceptual modelling among cooperating centers. Our methodology assigns responsibilities and tasks and regulates interactions preserving coherence; it passes through the construction of unambiguous paraphrases to make explicit the context within the original sources, and through their compositional representation in an intermediate language. The process is intrinsically iterative, with continuous feedbacks and refinements, alternating analytic view on details and synthetic view on regularities and structures. Our methodology is based on requirements and experience made in the first GALEN project, and was applied in the GALEN-IN-USE project to coordinate modelling activities of three teams of surgeons in Rome with activities of other partners, during the production of an extensive model of surgical procedures.