Category Archives: Computing

The real reason most software fails

To my mind there is a problem in academia to do with where disciplines like ‘computer science’ (CS) and applications of computing sit.  Pure computer science is the study of computational theory and applications. It develops things like data structures, … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, Culture, Health Informatics, Philosophy | 8 Comments

Identifying complex knowledge artefacts

Based on a lot of experience, thinking and gnashing of teeth of colleagues Ian McNicoll, Heather Leslie, Sebastian Garde who work on the Ocean Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM) product, as well as many others using archetypes and archetype tools more … Continue reading

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DCMs & archetypes – why we need 3 layers

This post is inspired by a slightly out-of-control discussion among people in the CIMI group. It’s a good discussion. The latest question that has come up is whether a DCM (Detailed Clinical Model) is a ‘model of use’ (i.e. some … Continue reading

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The power of the openEHR archetype formalism – visualised

I made a new beta release of the ADL Workbench today, a tool whose core is a parser and 3-pass validator for archetypes written in the openEHR Archetype Definition Language. Today’s release includes visualisation that really shows how archetypes form … Continue reading

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CIMI group goes with openEHR archetypes & UML profile

The Clinical Information Modelling Initiative (CIMI) group led by Dr Stan Huff (Intermountain Health, Utah) met here in London 29 Nov – 1 Dec to make a final decision on formalism, from the two remaining – openEHR archetypes and various … Continue reading

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Information models, DCMs and Archetypes

I will be attending a ‘Fresh Look’ meeting in Washington next week. The idea is to make some progress on the topic of  ‘detailed clinical models’ (DCMs). Some of the goals include setting up a repository of DCMs, establishing governance, … Continue reading

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A reboot for Eiffel, the world’s best programming language?

On 27 June, I ran a workshop at TOOLS 2011 in Zurich, entitled ‘Creating the new Eiffel Technology Community’. I did this at the invitation of Bertrand Meyer, the inventor of Eiffel and also the TOOLS conference programme chair.

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DCMs – can they look good AND be computable?

Let’s talk about mindmaps and archetypes. Mindmaps seem to be fuzzy and friendly – we need them because they are incredibly efficient at transmitting information to humans. Archetypes seem über-mathematical, but we need them to do proper model-based computing.

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Ontologies and information models: a uniting principle

Software developers and ontologists generally live in two different worlds. The former group think they are building systems to perform information processing and computation, and the latter group think they are formally describing some aspect of the world. [Note: slight … Continue reading

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The HL7 Null Flavor Debate – part 2

Previous: HL7 null flavors part 1 Null flavors – Objection #3: ontological problems The following table shows the current HL7v3 null flavor values. A full version of the table appears in Grahame Grieve’s blog post.

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