Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) is the "conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients". The practice of EBM means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. One of the main EBM tools to improve the quality of delivered health care is represented by Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs): systematically developed statements to assist practitioner and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances [Institute of Medicine, 1992]. In the last years, many research groups put efforts in developing tools for the representation and execution of CPGs.

Knowledge is social as produced and shared among a network of human and non-human actors within the organization. The mere existence of knowledge somewhere in the organization is of little benefit; it becomes useful only if it is accessible/sharable, and its value increases with the level of accessibility. This leads to the importance of communication/interaction (between humans and between humans and non-humans) as key factor for the success for a knowledge-intensive environment.Social Network Analysis (SNA) focuses on relationships among social entities and implications of these relationships.