Monday, August 25, 2014

Preparing for MIE2014

After a fantastic warm and sunny summer here in Sweden it's time for me to get prepared for the European Medical Informatics Conference - MIE2014, Istanbul, 31 Aug. to 3 Sept.


Our joint paper co-authored by members across the IMI EHR4CR, Open PHACTS, SALUS projects and W3C HCLS community describing "A Framework for Evaluating and Utilizing Medical Terminology Mappings" has been accepted. And I have got the opportunity to present it in the main conference on the 2th September. 


For me the paper started from some great discussions at ICBO (Int. Conference Biomedical Ontologies) in Montreal last year with Trish Whetzel (@TrishWhetzel) and Jim McCusker (@jpmccu) on the topic: "mappings are not sufficient - need the justifications for the mappings". We started to talk about using so called Nanopublications to capture the justification for the mapping for users to make better use of for example the mappings provided via the NCBO Bioportal.

When I came back from the ICBO conference I wrote a blog post outlining some more ideas on using Nanopublications and/or Linksets, both stemming from the IMI Open PHACTS project. Some nice comments and sharing of my blog post: Justifications of Mappings encourage me to work more on these ideas. My colleague in the EHR4CR project, Sajjad Hussain (+Sajjad Hussain), pointed me to a very interesting blog post: SALUS project on Terminology Mappings. After some great discussion over a lunch at the SWAT4LS conference in Edinburgh with Hong Sun, from SALUS, Charlie Mead and Eric Prud'hommeaux, from W3C HCLS, Alasdair Gray (@gray_alasdair) from Open PHACTS, and many more, Sajjad and I started to outline a paper decribing a framework combining solutions and ideas on evaluating and utilizing terminology mappings.

Beside presenting this paper I look forward to participate in an MIE2014 tutorial and workshop:
  • Tutorial on the IEEE 11073 Standards for Personal Health Devices (Wikipedia: ISO/IEEE_11073). This is a standard I have been looking into earlier. It nicely combines my interest in clinical trials and health care data standards together with my previous industrial PhD studies in Mobile Informatics (see the slides presenting my PhLic thesis from 2001: Mobile Newsmaking).
  • Workshop on Interoperability Challenges for enabling secondary use of Electronic Health Records — ICEH 2014 In this workshop I look foward to meet and talk with many including the great metadata and ontology experts Gokce Laleci Ertukmen and Anil Pacaci (@aasinaci), Software Research, Development and Consultancy, Turkey.

I hope to be able to use my Twitter (@kerfors) feed to share interesting things I learn about in the conference, and from the historic city of Istanbul. And gather tweets, links, photos from each day using Storify. In the same way as I have done from eralier conferences. 

So, have a look at my MIE2014 Storify for daily updates 31 Aug. to 3 Sept.