A few of you mentioned that I did not post my usual conference followup after attending AMIA last month in Washington, DC. Indeed, I have not! I suppose that is the disadvantage of attending conferences during the academic year - these followups tend to get lost in the overall sense of chaos that exists.
That said, I will do some followups, starting now, with an overview. AMIA is of course the annual gathering of the American Medical Informatics Association. http://www.amia.org/meetings/f05/ It was held in Washington DC at the Hilton Hotel in NE Washington DC, which rather gruesomely enough was the hotel where President Reagan was shot back in 1981. But, despite that, the hotel was in a very pleasant part of DC, near Dupont Circle. Sadly it rained nearly all the time while I was at the conference, so it was not too feasible to stroll around DC, which I find to be a very lovely city. I was at AMIA strictly as an observer - I had no presentations to make, no meetings to attend, etc. etc. This was in stark (and welcome) contrast to earlier conferences this year - for example ACL featured meeting after meeting and all sorts of work. AMIA was nice - I was able to go blissfully unnoticed, and just watch things unfold. I attended two tutorials before the start of the conference. The first was on UMLS - the Unified Medical Language System of the National Library of Medicine. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/ This is a rather massive effort to take lexicons, dictionaries, hierarchies, and ontologies created in the medical community, and to put them into a common format and provide some tools for manipulating them (hence the "Unified" in UMLS). The tutorial was an overview of the three main components of the UMLS - the Metathesaurus, the Semantic Network, and the Specialist Lexicon. The second tutorial was an introduction to ontologies in biomedicine (given by Dr. Mark Musen http://www.smi.stanford.edu/people/musen/index.html). This turns out to be a very interesting area, and strangely enough (for me) an area of great controversy and heated debate! I will not attempt to capture the nature of that debate right now, I still need to think about it a little, but it was certainly among the most intereting themese to emerge from AMIA. More on that to follow. It turns out that a National Center for Biomedical Ontology was created this last year, and they have a web site that contains some nice information about the general area of biomedical ontologies. http://www.bioontology.org/ After the tutorials the main conference began, and it was a very large event. There were approx 1800 people in attendance, which was by far the largest conference I had attended - previous personal record was probably about 1000 at AAAI in the mid-late 1990s... So, I will try and post a few more notes about AMIA in the days that come. I do believe it is important to follow up on these experiences with such summaries, both to spur my own thought processes and to let those of you who didn't attend know how it was. More soon, Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose.org helps at-risk students succeed. Fund a student project today! http://us.click.yahoo.com/9.ZgmA/FpQLAA/HwKMAA/x3XolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nlpatumd/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
