Guideline Definition Language (GDL) first release

Releases | March 11, 2013, 11:10 p.m.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the design specifications of Guideline Definition Language (GDL) and its reference implementation under open source software licenses. GDL is formal language designed to express and to share Clinical Decision Support rules across language and technical barriers by leveraging openEHR designs. CDS rules in GDL format is agnostic to natural languages, reference terminologies and rules engine languages.

There are considerable synergies in the development of clinical models and CDS rules. Semantically well-defined clinical models can provide reliable means of input and output of the rules. On the other hand, experiences from CDS rules development can lead to improvements of the clinical models as well as increased motivations to adopt structured and standardized clinical models. Reusing existing high-quality clinical models in the form of archetypes would hopefully increase the productivity in authoring and maintaining clinical rules.

Please note that GDL is still in development. We aim to submit the GDL specifications for review in openEHR in the near future. We look forward to the community's feedback to further improve the specifications.

Some important links from this release:


Rong Chen MD, PhD
On behalf of the Informatics Team,
Cambio Healthcare Systems, Sweden






>> Back to Releases