Ivan's Blog

Just returned from the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was a really long week, four days of conference with presentations to give, preceded by a W3C AC meeting. And, of course, lots of things that one heard, read, learned… not really possible to write all that down in a blog.

Here is an interesting thing I learned that is worth sharing (I hope). I listened to a tutorial on the last day on Semantics for Health Care and Life Sciences. Looking at the subject one expects explanations on how life science people have to manage terabytes of data that are stored in some sort of “silos”, and how RDF and the Semantic Web in general is helpful in combining these data, in setting and finding new relationships. And all that was of course explained (though I do not claim to have understood all the details. However, what really stroke me was something very different. If my understanding is correct, health care specialists have, in some cases, much much simpler problems. Doctors make annotations on the patient’s charts, they send these over to their colleagues or other experts using… PDF or Excel files. They use different terminologies in these notes that differ not only from one country to the other, but from one hospital to the other, too! Eric Neumann, one of the tutorial speakers, showed some very simple applications where a well working annotation system, using controlled vocabularies, built into the interactive note–taking tools that physicians use can make wonders. We are not talking here about hugely complex applications, but of a bit of RDFa (or, if you prefer, some sort of microformats), a bit of GRDDL, combining some simple RDF graphs, etc, can make wonders. Applications that we see in demo form made by SW geeks for SW geeks but which, suddenly, become of an utmost importance for non–geeks. “A little semantics can take you far”…