MODENA, ITALY and SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA–(Marketwired – June 4, 2013) - SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE – Expert System, the semantic technology company, today announced the launch of the Cogito semantic platform for content enrichment, Cogito SmartContent. Cogito SmartContent offers a full range of semantic features that enable publishers and digital content providers to harness the power of content for greater utilization and monetization across all formats.

Leveraging the power of semantic technology, Cogito SmartContent automatically enriches documents, content management systems and web pages with semantic information, metadata, tags and links to related content to maximize access and streamline delivery of content. Read more

The final session I attended at this week’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco was on a topic with perhaps the biggest potential impact of any topic covered this week. The panel was called RDF as a Universal Healthcare Exchange Language, and it offered the attendees of SemTechBiz a glimpse into what occurred at an invitation-only workshop earlier in the week on the same topic.

The impressive group of panelists consisted of David Booth, Senior Software Architect of KnowMED (the company that won the Start-Up Competition earlier this week); Stanley Huff, Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Intermountain Healthcare; Emory Fry, Founder of Cognitive Medical Systems; Conor Dowling, CTO of Caregraf; and Josh Mandel, Research Faculty for the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program at Harvard-MIT. The panelists prefaced their discussion quite elegantly in their description of the session:

“Healthcare information resides and continues to rapidly grow in a bewildering variety of vocabularies, formats and systems in thousands of organizations. This makes the exchange and integration of healthcare information exceedingly difficult. It inhibits access to complete and accurate patient data, undermines the key advantage of having patient data in electronic form, and drives up the already high cost of healthcare. Read more

PHILADELPHIA, June 4, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Elsevier, a word-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced a major investment in services provided to its society partners and individual readers: a new online platform and management system for its 500+ health, medical, and life science journal-branded websites.

The new online platform will provide these journal-branded websites improved search results accuracy, a more robust editorial tool to create topical article collections, and a high quality reading experience for visitors using mobile devices. The upgrades will begin this Fall. Read more

After days full of technically-focused sessions at SemTechBiz, Hans Constandt’s keynote this morning, ONTOFORCE: Links for Lives, was a thought-provoking break from technicality. Instead of delving into the specifics of how ONTOFORCE–the Belgian startup where Hans currently serves as CEO–is using various semantic tools, leveraging taxonomies, or monetizing their products, Hans instead stepped back and reminded us all of the much bigger picture: Linked open data can save lives.

Hans started his talk by sharing three stories from his own life of family members who have faced rare illnesses and struggled to find the health information they needed. Hans was able to help his family members find access to vital health information after a great deal of time, effort, and investment. But after helping those closest to him, he didn’t want to stop there. Each condition he researched was rare, but that meant that other people in the world facing similarly rare conditions were undoubtedly entrenched in the same struggle to obtain quality information.
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Ahmed Gabr of Wamda.com reports, “‘In order to achieve true Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have to make machines that are able to acquire knowledge in a scalable way, without human interaction, then use this knowledge to understand, answer questions, think and reason,’ says Egyptian entrepreneur and AI researcher Haytham El Fadeel. In 2008, El Fadeel started to build Kngine, which stands for Knowledge Engine, a semantic search engine that attempts to predict what a searcher really means when typing in a request. Conventional search engines navigate the user towards a particular web page or document, based on keywords, while a semantic search engine aims to understand the searcher’s intent and the contextual meaning of terms, in order to give complete answers.” Read more

One of the many highlights from yesterday at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco was the exciting conclusion of the Semantic Start-Up Competition. After each of the ten finalist companies presented their pitches to the judges, the expert panel deliberated and ultimately selected KnowMED as the big winner.

The KnowMED website states, “In healthcare, critical decisions are made every day that affect individual patient care, population health, and national health policy.  Read more

Medical Xpress reports, “One of the major frontiers of modern science is a comprehensive understanding of the human brain and its functions to guide the development of new technologies in information and communication. In a major announcement for the globalization of science, two Japanese research organizations, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and RIKEN, will join forces with a large European consortium on the Human Brain Project (HBP) which the European Commission has officially announced as one of two Future and Emerging Technology (FET) Flagship projects. The new project will federate international efforts to understand and simulate the human brain for the creation of new technological advances for society.” Read more

Marie Madden of the Galway Independent reports, “Eight projects at NUI Galway are to receive over €1m in funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). The investment is being made through SFI’s Technology Innovation Development Award (TIDA), in collaboration with Enterprise Ireland, and will focus on commercially relevant projects. The projects in receipt of the funding will include those focusing on acute leukaemia, bovine mastitis, biological oxygen demand monitoring system for wastewaters, GlycoShield, cancer therapy, drought stress tolerance in crop plants, social semantic journalism and the development of a data mapping system for retail business planning. The news was welcomed by Galway TD Derek Nolan, who said that it would enable numerous research teams to take the first steps in developing new discoveries and inventions with commercial potential.” Read more

What are the possibilities for RDF (Resource Description Framework) as a Universal Healthcare Exchange Language? It’s an issue to be explored next week at a SemTechBiz workshop in San Francisco.

The healthcare sector is rife with medical vocabularies and localized terminologies. In fact, says David Booth, Senior Software Architect, KnowMED, one of the leaders of the upcoming event, “some people have characterized the problem as not being one of a lack of vocabularies but of too many vocabularies.” To some extent that can’t be helped, because specific languages have grown up with various medical specialties and healthcare subdomains. What can be helped, though, is to create semantic connections among these vocabularies, to avoid the disconnects that can harm patients, researchers, and others.

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Wed May 22, 2013 9:00am EDT – Liaison Healthcare, a global provider of secure cloud-based integration and data management services and solutions, announced today the launch of its Healthcare Terminology Manager (HTM) and Healthcare Terminology Translator (HTT) as a part of the organization’s cloud-based Healthcare Information as a Service solutions suite. The new products provide health systems with a framework and translation support for managing different industry-standard controlled medical vocabularies, facilitating a seamless process for data exchange across the continuum of care. Read more