Barry Smith an sich

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński

Ontology as the core discipline of biomedical informatics: Legacies of the past and recommendations for the future direction of research

The automatic integration of rapidly expanding information resources in the life sciences is one of the most challenging goals facing biomedical research today. Controlled vocabularies, terminologies, and coding systems play an important role in realizing this goal, by making it possible to draw together information from heterogeneous sources – for example pertaining to genes and proteins, drugs and diseases – secure in the knowledge that the same terms will also represent the same entities on all occasions of use. In the naming of genes, proteins, and other molecular structures, considerable efforts are under way to reduce the effects of the different naming conventions which have been spawned by different groups of researchers. Electronic patient records, too, increasingly involve the use of standardized terminologies, and tremendous efforts are currently being devoted to the creation of terminology resources that can meet the needs of a future era of personalized medicine, in which genomic and clinical data can be aligned in such a way that the corresponding information systems become interoperable

Using ontology in query answering systems: Scenarios, requirements and challenges

Equipped with the ultimate query answering system, computers would finally be in a position to address all our information needs in a natural way. In this paper, we describe how Language and Computing nv (L&C), a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is working towards the ultimate Question Answering (QA) System for healthcare workers. L&C’s company strategy in this area is to design in a step-by-step fashion the essential components of such a system, each component being designed to solve some one part of the total problem and at the same time reflect well-defined needs on the prat of our customers. We compare our strategy with the research roadmap proposed by the Question Answering Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), paying special attention to the role of ontology

Informatics Research Institute (IRIS) July 2004 newsletter

This summer period has been rich in presence and dissemination related activities. Several important conferences, which have enjoyed a great international participation and success, have been organized by IRIS academics in Salford. These include NLDB04, CRIS 2004 and the LTSN workshop. Also, a substantial number of research projects have been secured from national as well as European funding sources. All these activities are contributing to reinforcing the leading position that IRIS is currently enjoying in the field of Informatics. This newsletter gives an overview of all research activities that took place during this reporting period. It is hoped that this will help trigger further collaboration with existing and future colleagues from academia, research and industry to work together towards addressing the many societal and technological challenges engendered by the information age

The view from elsewhere: perspectives on ALife Modeling

Many artificial life researchers stress the interdisciplinary character of the field. Against such a backdrop, this report reviews and discusses artificial life, as it is depicted in, and as it interfaces with, adjacent disciplines (in particular, philosophy, biology, and linguistics), and in the light of a specific historical example of interdisciplinary research (namely cybernetics) with which artificial life shares many features. This report grew out of a workshop held at the Sixth European Conference on Artificial Life in Prague and features individual contributions from the workshop's eight speakers, plus a section designed to reflect the debates that took place during the workshop's discussion sessions. The major theme that emerged during these sessions was the identity and status of artificial life as a scientific endeavor

Design issues for VREs: can richer records of meetings enhance collaboration?

Technologies for collaboration have advanced significantly in the past ten years. Through tools such as the Access Grid (AG), it is now possible to conduct multi-site meetings involving large numbers of participants interacting using high quality and video and sharing data. Virtual Venues within the AG toolkit store data, documents, applications and services which can be accessed across multiple sites. These documents might include records of the meetings themselves. We discuss ways in which such records can be made navigable and re-usable so that collaborators can achieve a shared understanding of meetings’ work