The Journal of Medical Systems has recently published an article that describes a method to trace semantic connections between clinical archetypes, based on the Unified Medical Language System:
Associating clinical archetypes through UMLS Metathesaurus term clusters
Clinical archetypes are modular definitions of clinical data, expressed using standard or open constraint-based data models as the CEN EN13606 and openEHR. There is an increasing archetype specification activity that raises the need for techniques to associate archetypes to support better management and user navigation in archetype repositories. This paper reports on a computational technique to generate tentative archetype associations by mapping them through term clusters obtained from the UMLS Metathesaurus. The terms are used to build a bipartite graph model and graph connectivity measures can be used for deriving associations.
Bipartite graph between clinical archetypes (blue nodes) and UMLS terms (green nodes)
The thicker the edge, the stronger the relationship between the associated archetypes.
Last week the whole consortium of the Organic.Edunet project gathered in Budapest for the final review meeting. During the last 3 years, we have developed a portal which provides educational resources about organic agriculture and agroecology in digital format, a methodology of work through scenarios, and a federation model that is already been used as the basis for “derived efforts” such as Organic.Mednet, Organic.Balkanet and CerOrganic.
The Organic.Edunet project was originally intended to facilitate access, usage and exploitation of digital educational content related to Organic Agriculture and Agroecology. Today, our Web portal provides access to more than 10,000 resources from 11 institutional collections and 2 user communities. After all the presentations, the result of the review was a green++ flag (in the own words of the Project Officer) and a explicit recognition of the quality of the work and the consortium team.
Representatives of all partners pose with the Project Officer and ther reviewers
On the personal side, I look back and realise how these 3 years represent an unforgettable learning experience -not always, but most often- for the good. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to lead the UAH team in the most exposed Work Package by far: the development of the portal and the creation of the semantic search engine. My special thanks to Nikos Manouselis, the man behind the idea; to Aage Steem, for his kindness and comprehension during the ontology creation (good luck on your new dedication!); Alberto and Ramiro, my close collaborators and excellent programmers (without them everything would have been harder); to Maria Toader, always ready to help and by far the quickest in all translation tasks! ; and to Nikos Palavitsinis, for his flexibility and patience when I submitted the cost reports later (virtually always!)
Drinks on the success of the Organic.Edunet project
UAH core development team celebrates
After all, we built a group that will hopefully cooperate in new projects in the forthcoming years, so we had many reasons to celebrate with a few drinks and enjoy the lively Budapest nightlife. Well done everybody and… Cheers!
