Professor Alan Rector
Kilburn Building
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester
United Kingdom
M13 9PL
Tel: +44 161 275 6188
Fax: +44 161 275 6204
Papers on SNOMED CT
Getting
the foot out of the pelvis:
Modelling problems affecting use of
SNOMED CT hierarchies in
practical applications
JAMIA 2011 (preprint)
Lexically
suggest, logically define:
Quality assurance of the use of
qualifiers and expoected results of
post coordination in SNOMED CT
J Biomed Inform,
Presented AMIA-2011
(Distinguished paper award)
(preprint)
ppt
SNOMED CT Quality Assurance:
What’s Critical for Users?
AMIA-2011 Panel
pdf
ppt
demo-video
Quality
assurance of the content of
a large DL-based Terminology
using mixed lexical & semantic
criteria: Experience with
SNOMED CT
Knowledge Capture (KCAP) 2011
(best paper award) preprint
ppt
Other recent &
Important Papers
Knowledge
Driven Software & "Fractal Tailoring": Ontologies in
development environments for
clinical systems FOIS 2010 ppt
Binding
ontologies & coding
systems to electronic health
records and messages
Applied Ontology 2009
Why
do it the hard way? The case
for an expressive description
logic for SNOMED
JAMIA 2008
Use
Cases for building OWL
ontologies as modules: Localizing,
Ontology and Programming
Interfaces & Extensions
4th Int
Workshop on Semantic Web
enabled software engineering
(SWESE-08)
What's
in a Code
Medinfo 2007
Granularity, scale and collectivity:
When size does and does not matter
Journal of Biomedical Informatics.
AIM: a
personal view
of where I have
been and where we might be going
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
23(1): 111-127 (2001).(pdf)
Owl pizzas: ...Common errors
& common patterns in OWL.
Proc EKAW 2004 (ed Motta,
Shadbolt, et al) LNCS LNAI3257
pp 63-81 pdf & slides
Recent presentations
Knowledge driven software &"Fractal tailoring": Ontologies
in development environments
for clinical systems.
FOIS 2010, Toronto, Canada.
The user is always right...
Even when they are wrong
KR-2006 Keynote, Windermere, UK,
June 2006
Terminologies & ontologies?
What are they for? What would it
mean to QA an ontology in health
care?
Semantic Mining Workshop on SNOMED,
Copenhagen, April 2006.
Clinical terminologies - history
and future.
SNOMED Implementation, London,
March 2005
Experimental OWL
Ontologies
Simple-top-bioBased on poster at PSB 2006 and
GALEN Reconstruction
Current Projects
Alan Rector is Professor of Medical Informatics in the School of Computer Science at University of Manchester. He received his BA in Philosophy and Mathematics from Pomona College, his medical training at the universities of Chicago and Minnesota where he obtained his MD, and his PhD in Medical Informatics from the University of Manchester.
Over the past twenty-five years he has led a series of projects on clinical decision support, medical records, and medical terminology including the ground breaking PEN&PAD project on intelligent medical records sponsored jointly by the UK Medical Research Council and Department of Health.
During the 1990s his work focused on medical terminology and
ontologies. He led the EU sponsored GALEN programme (www.opengalen.org)
and the Department of Health sponsored UK Drug Ontology Project.
His work on clinical terminology and ontologies provided a key
stimulus for the technologies underpinning the use of ontologies for
the Semantic Web. Increasingly his work has focused on the
development and application of the Web Ontology Language, OWL, and the Protege-OWL ontology
development environment. Much of this work was supported by the
JISC/EPSRC funded CO-ODE and HyOntUse projects. Protege-OWL
has been developed collaboratively with the Stanford Center
for Biomedical Informatics Research. The Manchester team is
particular pleased with the development of the new Protege-4-OWL
editor, which supports the new OWL 2
specification and includes many new
features to make developing ontologies quicker and easier.
Protege-4-OWL is based on the new OWL API also developed in
Manchester.
He currently leads two industrial collaborations using OWL to
enhance clinical systems. One is with Siemens Medical Solutions -
Health Service of the US, on knowledge driven clinical systems.
The other is with Informatics
CIS of Glasgow, on adaptable forms for pre-anaesthesia assessment
and other specialised information gathering tasks.
This work leads back to a concern with methodologies for using
OWL and other Semantic Web technologies effectively in practical
applications and the relationship between OWL and object-oriented and
frame based modelling systems.
From 2002 to 2008 he led the MRC sponsored Cooperative
Clinical E-Science Framework (CLEF)
consortium of UK universities and NHS
trusts that aimed to provide "joined up" information
solutions for clinical care and research. He also participated in
the EU-funded Semantic
Mining Network of Excellence and Semantic Health
Roadmap projects.
He has been a visiting senior scientist at Stanford University and consultant to the NHS and Connecting for Health, Hewlett Packard, the Mayo Clinic, and a variety of smaller companies. He has been active in various national and international commities including, the JISC Support of Research Committee, the National Cancer Research Institute's Informatics Initiative, the Joint NHS/Higher Education Forum on Informatics, and the Board of the Academic Forum of the UK Institute for Health Informatics. He has also been active in HL7, the main standards body for health informatics, and on the board of HL7-UK.
In 2003, Professor Rector was awarded the first British Computer Society Health Informatics Committee award for lifetime service to Health Informatics.