OBJECTIVE: This paper discusses the development environment that automatically generates software intended to execute arbitrarily defined functions. Software that we develop can be regarded as a kind of development environment or development platform, and its purpose is the automatic generation of the clinical data acquisition system that supports arbitrary clinical researches.

METHODS: Basically, the clinical data acquisition system consists of the interface, the data storage and the clinical research protocols. Our development environment generates these components automatically according to the ontology written by the end user, e.g. a clinical researcher. A clinical data acquisition system is then generated.

RESULTS: Our development environment consists of the interface generation module, the database generation module, the temporary data storage generation module for CDA (clinical document architecture), and the ontologies. Ontology is a method of expressing structured information and can be regarded as a knowledge base serialized by XML format. These ontologies are constructed by domain experts who want a clinical research support system. Ontology describes clinical data items, the interface design and the database schema of a clinical data acquisition system. The development environment parses these ontologies and secures the information on how to generate a clinical data acquisition system.

CONCLUSION: This study can be utilized to develop the clinical data acquisition system in oriental medicine.