[UPDATED: April 18, 2013, 11:46am]

The upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco is set to host a thought-provoking panel on RDF as a Universal Healthcare Language. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) identified the need for a universal healthcare exchange language as a key enabler in addressing this problem by improving healthcare data portability. Many familiar with Semantic Web technology have recognized that RDF / Linked Data would be an excellent candidate to meet this need, for both technical and strategic reasons. Although RDF is not yet well known in conventional healthcare IT, it has been beneficially used in a wide variety of applications over the past ten years — including medical and biotech applications — and would exceed all of the requirements outlined in the PCAST report. Read more

Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics recently wrote, “The best thing about the Big Data hype in pharma is how effectively it’s shed light on all of the Small Data problems the industry is facing. The roots of the Big Data movement in pharma were innocent enough: challenges in storage, data access, and data analytics that organizations started seeing with shifts toward high-throughput screening and massive genomics data sets. But as Big Data became more and more mainstream, the range of business challenges that got slapped with the “Big Data” label started ranging further and further afield. Industry analysts noticed this quickly, redefining Big Data in terms of the three (or four) Vs–not just volume but also variety, velocity, and variability. Others have been quick to follow. At a recent conference on data-driven drug development, speaker after speaker stood up to talk about their approach to Big Data, and each speaker immediately qualified that they were speaking about the variety of data, rather than the volume of data.” Read more

Susan Watts of the BBC reports, “Government and companies now collect, store and analyse as much information as they can about the way we interact with them. Their goal is the pursuit of efficiency, and to find ways to save, or make, money. There is even a phrase for it – ‘big data’. The idea is not just to collect this data, but to analyse it. Take healthcare. In December 2012, the government announced a big data plan for perhaps our most intimate of data, the DNA read-out of 100,000 people with rare diseases and cancer. It is a colossal sequencing effort. Not only does each patient have a unique DNA code, but so do their cancer tumours. And some patients will respond to certain drugs better than others, depending on the genetic variants they carry.”

Watts goes on, “The claim is that a mass DNA database could herald a new era in medicine, and make the nation richer too. Read more

One of the exciting things about being a semantic technologist is the opportunity to be in on the ground floor of things as companies revamp, revise, and renew their infrastructures for the Web 3.0 world.

That’s the position that Keith DeWeese finds himself in. DeWeese recently moved from The Tribune Company, where he led efforts in applying semantic technology to the publisher’s content (see story here), to Ascend Learning, a company that provides technology-based education products with a focus on the healthcare sector.

There, as principal content architect he is again championing the power of semantic technology for online content. “What’s cool is that Ascend is in a state of redefining what it does, how it works, its whole platform,” DeWeese says. Ascend wants to be able to take people from the beginning stages of their career, when they’re learning the basics, and work with them throughout their life, so that as they progress in their careers and become more knowledgeable about their profession or specialization and work toward different exams, it’s got the tools to engage with them at that part of their lifecycle.

“It’s really great because there’s an openness and willingness to try different approaches to making content available to end users.”

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Attend the upcoming SemTech session that’s dubbed Using Semantic Technologies to Deliver Industrial Strength Healthcare Benefits Administration, and you’ll hear about how semantics- and model-driven computing is the future – and how it’s a future that’s already gotten underway at The Central Administrative Agency of the Netherlands (CAK).

First, a little bit about the bigger picture.  “What can happen when you go all the way to semantic, model-driven, knowledge computing [is that] … it changes the game for development,” says Mills Davis, managing director of Project 10X and one of the session’s presenters. “It enables new categories of capabilities and levels of user experience (think SIRI for the rest of us). It brings about quantum changes in all stages of lifecycle value. It enables cost-effective strategy-driven approaches to enterprise transformation. This last sentence is worth some reflection.”

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BayScribe and Perfect Search Corporation have partnered to “bring NLP powered semantic search to healthcare.” According to the article, “With this partnership BayScribe will utilize Perfect Search’s unique indexing and search technology to enhance their Semantic Interoperability platform. Able to index and search structured EMR data, unstructured free text, NLP processed records, DICOM radiology data, lab tests, and more in real time, clients will be provided with unparalleled access to critical data.” Read more

June 21, 2010, Bellevue, WA — Atigeo (www.atigeo.com), a compassionate technology company delivering revolutionary semantic software, will host three panel sessions at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco, June 23^rd and 24^th, highlighting technologies that enable a holistic view of the consumer for enterprises, semantic understanding, and consumer privacy and control.

Atigeo’s Chief Scientist, Olly Downs, will moderate a discussion, True Semantic Reasoning: Self-Constructing Ontologies. The panel will explore the topics of spatial tagging, managing multiple identities, and cognitive computation in an effort to define true semantic reasoning without the formal structures leveraged in current approaches to semantic understanding. Olly will be joined by Jeff Jonas, IBM Distinguished Engineer/Chief Scientist of Entity Analytic Solutions and Marc Davis, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder Invention Arts.

Atigeo’s second panel will explore the current opportunities and issues surrounding the advent of the personal data locker.  Topics to be addressed include:

• • How will personal data lockers, linked data, semantic understanding, and intelligent agents form an ecosystem of semantically rich applications that present relevant content and services?
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• • How will this ecosystem enable businesses to offer customers more relevant, convenient, and useful content and experiences while maintaining user privacy and control?

“Only technologies that provide a more humanistic understanding of people and data without relying on structured ontologies can dramatically accelerate the semantic web today, taking us from the overwhelming and noisy real-time web to the more productive and profitable right-time web,” said David Boardman, Vice President of Product Strategy at Atigeo.

Boardman will be joined by a prominent panel moderated by David Siegel, author of Pull. Additional panel participants include Chris Messina – Open Web Advocate at Google, Drummond Reed – Executive Director of the Information Card Foundation and the Open Identity Exchange, Kaliya Hamlin – User-Centric Digital Identity Expert, and Phil Wolff – DataPortability.org.   

In a third panel, Atigeo’s Patrick Quigley, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, will be presenting an introduction to xPatterns™ with Etienne Gadient, Integrated Solutions Group Manager at Forsythe. Atigeo's xPatterns platform facilitates the intelligent discovery of knowledge from large disparate sources of dynamically changing structured and unstructured data. Underlying xPatterns is novel technology that allows the automated creation and dynamic maintenance of semantic ontologies.

About Atigeo™

Atigeo is a compassionate technology company turning science into products and services for a wiser planet.  Our unique semantic platform, xPatterns™, facilitates the intelligent discovery of knowledge from large disparate sources of dynamically changing, structured, and unstructured data.  Third party applications can easily be deployed on xPatterns through web-services to immediately enrich data insight through the self-discovery of patterns and concepts in real-time.  xPatterns enables a trust model the enterprise may extend to their users, providing each user the ability to privately manage their data, and automatically leverage offline information to provide unprecedented experiences and benefits.  xPatterns is enabling telecommunication providers, healthcare providers, government organizations and retailers to leverage new insights in real-time, derived from data that has been traditionally difficult to link and expensive to maintain.  xPatterns software can be delivered as Software-as-a-Service or Appliance-based.  For more information, visit: www.atigeo.com.

About Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech)

SemTech is the world's largest conference on semantic technologies. It is the only event focused on the commercialization of semantic technologies, bringing the most recognized names, knowledge, leadership, and innovation in the semantic community together in one location. SemTech is owned and operated by Semantic Universe, the semantic community’s trusted information resource. For more information please visit www.SemanticUniverse.com, email: info@semanticuniverse.com,  or call (310) 337-2616.

In our last post on Intelligent Healthcare, we talked a bit about Electronic Healthcare Record systems. EHR/EMR technology is an important piece of the larger set of clinical systems as it represents a patient centric organizational framework. However; EHRs are only part of a larger picture. One area that is particularly promising for the application of Semantic technology to healthcare is process management. When we discuss process management in this context, we’re not talking about traditional process management software solutions. Healthcare process management is in a sense a formalization of (medical) practice approaches that for the most part aren’t automated and in many cases likely never can be fully automated.

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