Professor Alan RectorKilburn Building
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New paper on
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I am Professor emeritus of Medical Informatics in the School of
Computer Science at University of Manchester. My current interest is in the confusions and ambiguity
around "ontologies" in biomedical information systems, the
use and mis-use of OWL, and the relation of OWL &
Description Logics to other knowledge representaiton
formalisms, particularly frames and the ICD family of
classifications. (See new (2019) jointpaper On
Beyond Gruber: "Ontologies" on today's biomedical
information systems and the limits of OWL.)
This work grew out of the experience of the
interdisciplinry WHO-sponsored ICD-11 project to harmonise
SNOMED CT and ICD and to extend ICD to become a broader
biomedical knowledge base, an effort that was fruitful
intellectually but, sadly, never released. I also remain concerned about the why many clinical
information systems have failed to improve patient care
and the lives of health care professionals - and about
their costs and sometimes counterproductive effects. From the late 1970s I 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 my work focused on medical terminology
and ontologies. I led the EU sponsored GALEN programme (www.opengalen.org)
and the Department of Health sponsored UK Drug Ontology
Project. My work on clinical terminology and ontologies provided a
key stimulus for the technologies underpinning the use of
ontologies for the Semantic Web. Starting in the
late 1990s my work 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 then new OWL 2 specification, the Manchester OWL syntax, and many other features to make developing ontologies quicker and easier. Protege-4-OWL is based on the new OWL API also developed in Manchester. This work is now continued at Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. During the 2000s I led 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. From 2002 to 2008 I 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. During this same period I participated in the WHO
sponsored interdisciplinary project to develop a version
of ICD-11 that would harmonise ICD with SNOMED-CT and
supplement it with a broader biomedical knowledge
base. The many discussions, confusions, and eventual
resolutions led directly to my current interest in the
interaction between different forms of knowledge
representation and serious concern about the over-use of
OWL and description logics beyond their intended function
and often contrary to their semantics, summarised in the
recent paper On
Beyond Gruber: "Ontologies" on today's biomedical
information systems and the limits of OWL. I received my BA in Philosophy and Mathematics from Pomona
College, my medical training at the universities of
Chicago and then Minnesota, where I obtained my MD. I
received my PhD in Medical Informatics from the University
of Manchester. I have been a visiting senior scientist at Stanford University and consultant to the NHS and Connecting for Health, WHO, Hewlett Packard, the Mayo Clinic, and a variety of smaller companies. I have 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 have also, at various times, been active in HL7, the main standards body for health informatics, and on the board of HL7-UK. In 2003, I was awarded the first British Computer Society
Health Informatics Committee award for lifetime service to
Health Informatics. I am also a fellow of the
International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics
(IAHSI) and an international fellow of the American
College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). June 2019
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