Ontologies needed for healthcare

Why Do We Need Ontologies in Healthcare Applicatihttp://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gifons by Joel Amoussou,Adventures in Computing. (Aug 27)

Some effort here to define ontologies vs data structures.

"Ontologies are our conceptualization (understanding) of the world while information models (of data structures) describe and constrain how the data is stored and transmitted in messages."

He presents a strong argument on why ontologies - a semantic frame of reference - is so direly needed in healthcare.

"For obvious reasons, healthcare applications require a high degree of model quality and consistency. This is not always possible or easy to do with traditional approaches such as object-oriented design (the HL7 RIM is based on the UML) and data structures such as XML and relational database schemas.

A clear and clean separation of concerns is needed between the semantic model (the ontology) and the information model (the model of how the data is structured in an XML message or the health application's data store). The ontology can be used to verify that the content of a message is accurate in regard to our conceptualization of the world, while the information model is used to validate the data structure in the data stores and XML messages exchanged with other applications. "

Content Choreography Seminar Series

Fascinating new 4-part webinar series coming up at Earley and Associates - Content in Context: Why Dynamic Content and Content Choreography Is Critical to Information Management

"Dynamic content management combines sophisticated use of taxonomy and content metadata to choreograph and assemble information based on various factors – who the user is, what step in a process they are engaged in, what information they need to execute a task, the topics they are interested in, etc."

The Earley newsletter described content choreography very cleverly -- "Taxonomy and metadata have the potential to be so much more than just strings on a content puppet (although they certainly act that way at a minimum). That's where the choreography part comes in - planning, composing, organizing, presenting, reacting to audience interaction in a controlled yet artful way. It's like the difference between your last high school dance and the Cirque du Soleil."

There is an accompanying slideshow presentation with definitions, process for building, and application.

Starts September 15, 2011

HP acquires Autonomy

HP to Acquire Info Management Software Firm Autonomy, Joab Jackson, IDG news via PCWorld (Aug 18)

Hewlett-Packard is changing its strips from hardware to software - it is acquiring information management software vendor Autonomyfor $10.3 billion. It wants into enterprise software - and Autonomy has that in spades.

"Founded in 1996, Autonomy offers a broad line of information management software, including enterprise search, content management, data analysis and governance software. It serves more than 25,000 organizations, including BAE Systems, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, FedEx, Ford, the New York Stock Exchange, Shell, Tesco, T-Mobile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Software companies such as Citrix, Oracle, Sybase, Symantec, Tibco as well as HP itself all incorporate Autonomy software into their own packaged offerings."

Eqentia using semantic technologies

Eqentia Offers More Robust Taxonomy Capabilities For Content Curators, And More, Jennifer Zaino, Semantic Web (Aug 3)
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A lot is happening in use of taxonomies at Eqentia, a custom-news centre, to help users find more on topics of interest.

"Eqentia added to its content discovery and knowledge management portal this week features to recommend additional content or people connections to end users and content curators. But it’s also been doing some other interesting work in the past couple of months on the back-end that draws on semantic technologies to help curators and content administrators of custom Eqentia-based knowledge portals with their taxonomies."

Google+ entities and attributes

Thoughts on Google Plus: The Magic Isn’t Social, It’s Semantic by Christine Connors, Semanticweb.com (July 29, 2011)

Christine Connors said, that Google+ is “one of the subtlest and most user-friendly ontology development systems we’ve ever seen.”

This is why - "Why did I do so? Well, G+ follows some of the basic principles of linked data: it uses persistent HTTP URIs for people, Sparks (concepts) and posts. It allows you to indicate a relationship between to entities and give that relationship a type. It collects, and types, attributes about entities from the expected experts – the entities themselves."

The article is a real-life short course in entities and attributes.

Interview with Margie Hlava

Stephen Arnold got an Exclusive Interview with Margie Hlava, Access Innovations (July 19)

They seem to be friends - "On a rare visit to Louisville, Kentucky, on July 15, 2011, I was able to talk with Ms. Hlava about the explosion of interest in high quality content tagging, the New Age word for indexing. Our conversation covered the roots of indexing to the future of systems which will be available from Access Innovations in the next few months. ... How often do I in rural Kentucky get to interact with one of the, if not the, leading figure in taxonomy development and smart, automated indexing? Answer: Not often enough."

Go on to read the full interview for more on indexing and taxonomies

ConceptSearching - taxonomy webinar for Sharepoint 2010

Concept Searching, a partner of Microsoft, offers a webinar on setting up a taxonomy with Sharepoint 2010 - August 10, 2011

Webinar: Leveraging Taxonomy Term Store for SharePoint - defining a multi-taxonomy structure for content management - "Get your arms around your business content. Best practices to designing a taxonomy and metadata schema to work with the Term Store for SharePoint 2010! "

Details at Microsoft Events - Click to Attend

Also check recorded webinars for previous topics.

How to build faceted navigation

Building Faceted Navigation That Doesn't Suck by Mike CP, SEOMoz (June 19)

How to build a faceted navigation system for a web site - recommends using Ajax - "AJAX can make the user experience of applying and unapplying filters to your navigation fast and enjoyable. "

Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus

Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus in SKOS/RDF format

Library and Archives Canada Canada is making its Subject Thesaurus available for download.

"The Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus is a bilingual thesaurus consisting of terminology that represents all the fields covered in the information resources of the Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada is exploring the potential for linked data and the semantic web with LAC vocabularies, metadata and open content."

From the about page: "The tool is primarily intended for content managers, librarians, indexers and metadata developers in federal departments and agencies who must select controlled subject terms to index Government of Canada Web resources."

Taxonomies as part of "content choreography"

Earley and Associates has webinars to help in thinking about design of information management systems to control information overload.

The email announcing these gave an overview of tools.

"This so-called "information overload" problem will be solved in the same way - by creating lists, classification structures, bibliographies, reference materials and all sorts of dynamic, curated content. The best web sites have the capability of anticipating what users need and assembling that content dynamically - something we refer to as "content choreography" - the ability to coordinate, weave and present content into new information products and services based on the needs of a diverse set of users all operating on the site at the same time. And of course, to combine, curate, and choreograph content effectively requires metadata, taxonomies, consistent organizing principles tuned to audience, task and problem."

It beings with Taxonomy and Master Data Management (June 23)