A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF APPLICATIONS CENTRED ON CONTEXT AND EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE

Conceptual frameworks are used to present a preferred approach to an idea or thought. Its use considerably facilitates the productivity of the data modelling phase and hence the development of applications, since it preserves portability and usability across domains. Evidence-Based Practice (EBP), usually employed in Medicine, represents a decision-making process centered on justifications of relevant information. EBP is used in several areas; however, we did not found conceptual models involving EBP that preserves portability and usability across domains. Besides, the decision-making context can have an impact on evidence-based decision-making, but the integration of evidence and context is still an open issue. This work presents a conceptual framework that integrates evidence with context applying it to the conceptual modelling phase for EBP domains. The use of context allows filtering out more useful information. The main contributions of this paper are: incorporation of contextual information into EBP procedures and presentation of the proposed conceptual framework. Also an implementation that uses the filtering of contextual information to support evidence-based decision making in the area of crime prevention is presented to validate the framework.