Next month’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco will include a number of panels featuring experts from virtually every facet of the evolving world of semantic web technologies. Experts from major companies and successful startups will share their knowledge on such topics as semantic video, search, financial data, and semantic Big Data. Early bird prices end at midnight tonight. Save $500 off on-site prices and register now!

SemTechBiz Panels

Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming Of Age – TV and Video Metadata powers video search, discovery, personalization, and is increasingly used as the basis for targeted advertising and product placement. Join this panel as they explore and discuss advances made and challenges faced over the past year in semantic applications for video.

RDF as a Universal Healthcare Exchange Language – RDF offers a practical evolutionary pathway to semantic interoperability. It enables information to be readily linked and exchanged with full semantic fidelity while leveraging existing IT infrastructure investments. Being schema-flexible, RDF allows multiple evolving data models and vocabularies to peacefully co-exist in the same instance data, without loss of semantic fidelity. This panel will discuss the goal of adopting RDF/Linked Data as a universal healthcare exchange language. Read more

Gary Hamilton of GovHealthIT recently wrote, “Today, the acquisition of patient information for population health management is typically done through Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs). Although the exchange of health information is possible via CCDs, the amount of information they contain can be overwhelming. As such, poring over CCDs to find information relevant to patient populations can be unwieldy and time consuming. With providers challenged to manage information in just one CCD, how can they hope to use these documents to effectively influence care at the population level? The key is to look for ways to use technology to target specific patient information, pinpoint new and relevant information and alert both patients and providers when updated information is available.” Read more

Earlier this month Gartner named semantic technologies to its top ten trends list (see our story here). Recently, we caught up with Gartner vp and distinguished analyst Debra Logan, the lead author on the semantic technologies section of the Top 10 Technology Trends Impacting Information Infrastructure, 2013, to learn more about sem tech’s earning a place on the list.

One interesting point Logan made is that the top ten trends list actually is a reflection of inquiries Gartner sees from its end-user clients. So, semantic technologies’ spot on the list would seem to indicate a bubbling-up of real-world, enterprise interest. As Logan sees it, it’s very much about information overload, about minimizing the risk and maximizing the value of the data on their hands, and about the availability now from providers like Amazon and Google of infrastructures for analyzing Big Data sets.

“If we could get the same meaning from data, we might actually know what is going on, because we sure don’t now,” says Logan, of the quandary facing enterprise IT leaders. “They are struggling with definition issues and reconciliation because of the proliferation of different IT systems.”

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Healthline Networks and Visual Health Solutions and Denver’s leading healthcare system, HealthONE, today announced a partnership to provide patients and physicians with Healthline’s BodyMaps application via the HealthONE website, www.HealthONEcares.com.

BodyMaps demystifies complex aspects of health by combining Healthline’s unique semantic taxonomy and Visible Health Solution’s high-quality anatomical content into a unique interactive 3D experience for users to visually explore the human body, from its largest organ to its smallest bone. BodyMaps also maps thousands of anatomical and clinical terms to simple patient-friendly synonyms, making it understandable to anyone. Read more

Clinical studies aren’t what they used to be. In the past, the process was one-off: You conducted a study, gathered a lot of data, analyzed it, wrote a report, and submitted it to the authorities. But, says long-time Linked Data advocate Kerstin Forsberg, an information architect at AstraZeneca, that’s all changed in the last few years.

“A study is not a study on its own,” says Forsberg. Today, the goal is  to do meta-analysis across many studies, so parties ranging from  pharmaceuticals companies to contract research organizations to government authorities all are ‘customers’ of clinical data, so to speak. Data from various studies must be shared among all these parties. “It puts a new context around clinical trial data, that it must be easy to link data together, to link across several different studies,” she says.

The case is there to use modern information standards, like semantic web standards and Linked Data principles, to address this need. It’s why Forsberg is one of the individuals spearheading a volunteer effort to create RDF and OWL representations of the standards published by the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) an international, non-profit organization that develops and supports global data standards for medical research.

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This week a new Big Data startup company launched, Ayasdi, co-founded by Stanford mathematics professor Gunner Carlsson and based on his DARPA-funded research in the area of applied topology, with $10+million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures and Floodgate.
The technology, dubbed the Insight Discovery platform, is explained to be the “first machine learning platform that combines computer science and a branch of mathematics known as Topological Data Analysis (TDA) that visualizes the entire dataset.” Hundreds of machine learning algorithms, it says, go to work exploring datasets to in minutes automatically discover insights that can’t be determined through query-based or ad hoc approaches.

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Kathleen Roney of Becker’s Hospital Review recently opined, “In order for the healthcare industry to move toward preventive care and population health management, clinical information needs to flow freely across networks and between hospitals and physicians. For this reason, healthcare organizations need interoperability — efficient yet secure means for IT systems and software applications to communicate and exchange patient data. While CMS focused the latest stage of its meaningful use program on measures and objectives to encourage interoperability, the effect of that will not be seen until later in 2013 and early 2014 when providers begin to incorporate those measures and objectives into their clinical work. ” Read more

OnlineTMD reports, “‘A Mercedes Benz isn’t designed to function in the Sahara Desert,’ notes Dr. Eliah Aronoff-Spencer of the University of California, San Diego. ‘So why are we designing medical equipment for developing countries the same way we do for developed ones?’ It’s a question researchers at the new Distributed Health Laboratory in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San Diego aim to address, and eventually, to render moot. In collaboration with the UC San Diego School of Medicine and the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) in Maputo, Mozambique, Calit2′s DH Lab is designing low-cost medical devices such as microscopes and wireless sensing devices that can be used by virtually anyone anywhere in the world to prevent and even diagnose illness.” Read more

There’s a new term in town: Participatory mHealth. As defined by Deborah Estrin, Professor of Computer Science at CornellNYC Tech and co-founder of Open mHealth, it “is taking what was previously unmeasured and uncaptured behavior – [things] that were previously ephemeral — and turn that into data.” Such information can be as valuable to treating conditions as is data collected by the instruments and diagnostics tools in formal health care settings, and perhaps can be a more reliable indicator of how a person’s health really is faring than their response to a doctor’s question at exam time. Those answers, after all, can be influenced by so many things – how they’re feeling that morning, for instance, vs. how they’ve generally felt since the last time they spoke to their healthcare provider.

With so many people today in possession of a smart phone with built-in GPS capabilities, there’s a new opportunity to capture so much data about what individuals do – especially those with chronic conditions – as well as the distance parameters related to where they’re doing it, the times they set out for an activity, how they’re feeling at various times during the day, and a whole lot more. “Chronic disease in some ways is the killer app for this kind of mobile health technology,” Estrin noted, since most of the care for dealing with chronic conditions occurs outside the clinical setting.

The capture is the easy part, says Estrin – much of it can be automated or be entered via a simple click, for instance. “The heavy lifting is in the analysis, in fusing and pulling out what is interesting from those data streams,” Estrin told an audience at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in New York City on Wednesday.

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Kathleen Roney of Becker Hospital Review reports, “Many hospitals and healthcare systems know the value that technology can provide for patient safety, clinical quality and overall decision making. But, they face enormous challenges when it comes to accessing and organizing information so it is available when they need it. Too often, hospitals are blocked by silo’d data reporting, lackluster HIT infrastructure and inadequate tools… For those hospitals and health systems that need help beginning the research and analysis phase, here are eight HIT infrastructure tools and software services to consider.” Read more