Author Archives: Candidasa dasa, UK

WWW2006 day 5: health care
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UK National Health Service (NHS): web-enabled primary care is finally coming, but is still super-clunky. And forget technology use in secondary care, it’s non-existent. If only there was a central registry of patient’s records. That would be really useful both for patients and statistical medical research. It would also be very cost effective.

The NHS is spending ?£6 billion on modernizing its information technology. Unfortunately, despite being only about one year into the project, they are already ?£1 billion pounds over budget.

I know from first hand ontology building experience that the Systematized Nomenclature of Medical Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT), which is supposed to underly this whole revamp, is an extremely poorly architected ontology. A disaster just waiting to happen.

USA Health IT: IT in health could prevent some of the 90,000 avoidable annual deaths due to medical errors. Test often have to be re-done, because it’s cheaper to re-test someone than to find the previous lab results. We need to get rid of the medical clipboard!

Knowledge diffusion is super-slow. It takes 17 years (!) for observed medical evidence to be integrated into actual practice. Empower the consumer (while also providing privacy and data protection). Also, empower homeland security to protect us from the evildoers.

Most practices don’t have Electronic Health Records (EHR). Those would enable some degree of data exchange between practices, which would benefit a practice’s competitors. The patient would be less tided to one doctor. Less tie-in means less profit. So, in the fierce competitive market of for-profit health care, there is little reason to go electronic.

However, SNOMED will help (… or so they say).

WWW2006 day 3: drinks reception
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In the evening there was a food and drinks reception at the Edinburgh Castle.

The castle was impressive. Very large and imposing. I could literally feel the history of the place. Many, many wars were fought on its mighty walls. The entire city of Edinburgh has a unique ancient feeling to it. Of course, not everything was awe-inspiring. The dog cemetery, for instance, was laughable (sad, sad, sad).

The reception (price of admission = ?£50) involved pretty waitresses walking around with trays of expensive wine and hors d’oeuvre for everyone’s enjoyment and nourishment. However, there was far too much wine and far too little food. Every time a food tray appeared, the poor waitress was jumped upon by a crowd of hungry researchers and raided for all she (or, more accurately, her food tray) was worth.

The food was completely abominable, too. Various varieties of dead animals. The only vegetarian options I saw were plates of deep-fried mushroom balls. Yum. Needless to say, I didn’t eat or drink anything, nor did I have much opportunity to.

As the night wore on the who’s who of the World Wide Web became more and more drunk. Give famous and powerful innovators, researchers and academics lots of free alcohol and they turn into “high-class” swaying, stammering simpletons. The British are especially renowned for their joy in and expertise at getting themselves utterly and completely drunk. It is, after all, the supreme form of enjoyment.

It was however a good opportunity to meet and rub shoulders with like-minded people from all over the world. I met lots of folks from my alma mater, Southampton University. However, with 1200 delegates attending, it was a bit too overwhelming. With so many people it is difficult to get to know anyone.

Feel free to browse the pictures of this event, as well as the rest of the conference here.

WWW2006 day 3: next wave, semantic web
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Wendy Hall started off the day talking about the trials and tribulations of organizing the conference. She had to put up a ?£0.5 million deposit to secure the conference center three years in advance. She could have kissed her career goodbye, if this conference had not been a success.

Next Charles Hughes the president of the British Computer Society (BCS) spoke. He gave an utterly boring scripted speech about how computing needs to become a respected professional profession.

Carole Goble then spoke about the paper review process. The conference was super-competitive. 700 papers were submitted, over 2000 reviews issued, and only 84 papers accepted (11% acceptance ratio).

Thereafter came a panel discussion on the next wave of the web. Important people from research and industry talked about the semantic web. Business wants TCO figures, risk measures, abundance of skilled ontology engineers and stuff like that. Academia underestimated the amount of work necessary (and wants more grant money).

Ontologies can be used today: they are especially useful for unstructured information and to organize already structured information in database tables.

Tim Berners-Lee brushed off Web 2.0 as just hype. That’s just AJAX and tagging. Folksonomy is not going to fly in the business world. The real, hard-core Semantic Web is where it’s at. What’s more: we’re already there. We’ve reached critical mass, but just haven’t realized it yet. All we need is for the right search engining to “connect the dots” and boom! Instant semantic web via network-effect (or something like that).

The right user interface is going to be the most difficult part. Browsers will need an “Oh yeah? Why?” button query the RDF and give a justification for any entailment.

“Don’t think of the killer app for the semantic web, think of the semantic web as the killer app for the normal web”

The value of the semantic web will be universal interoperability and findability. We have more information than ever before and are spending longer trying to find stuff. The semantic web will help automate some of the “find stuff”. The search engines of today aren’t sufficient went searching for information on Exxon Mobile, for example. That will return millions of hits.

Tim: “search engines make their money making order out of chaos, if you give them order, they don’t have a business. That’s why they are not interested in the semantic web”

Take home message from the panel:

  • “you ain’t seen nothing yet”
  • “a lot of education still has to go on. It needs to get simpler for the average business person and there needs to be a lot more investment”
  • “we can already apply the first results in a business context”
  • “it’s a great simplifying technology”

My take: they are quite right, we have indeed not seen anything yet … if nothing else they certainly succeeded in securing the next 5 years of grant money …