Keynote Speakers

Professor Keith Jeffery, Director, IT of CCLRC at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

GRIDs, Ambient Computing and Healthcare

Abstract
This paper describes a new IT (Information Technology) architecture which has the potential to improve greatly the collection, calibration, storage, retrieval, analysis and display of healthcare data. It provides facilities for integrating heterogeneous data sources or for data exchange between different sources. It provides knowledge discovery in databases capability using data mining techniques. It permits linkage of healthcare research, survey or best practice papers with their source data and programs to allow repetition and peer-review of the science. It allows remote control of detectors and sensors, and of analytical facilities thus permitting convenient operation from an operative's 'home base'. Finally it provides integrated data collection (by humans or sensors) and expert guidance of human data collectors. The whole system is protected against misuse by authentication and authorisation subsystems. The architecture offers healthcare an easy-to-use facility for data integration, analysis and visualisation, for information handling, for knowledge discovery and for data collection improvement - all leading to better information, to increased knowledge, to greater cost-effectiveness and to improved healthcare and medical understanding and management. The application domain is from the most complex procedures in research hospitals to preventative healthcare in the home.

Short CV
Keith Jeffery is currently Director, IT of CCLRC (Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils), based at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in UK. His Business and Information Technology Department (15mEuro p.a. turnover, 140 staff) provides services to CLRC, national services to the UK academic community and undertakes research and development projects funded by the UK Research Councils, government departments, the European Commission and commerce and industry internationally. Keith holds a BSc in Geology, a PhD in Geology (with a very large computing content!) and is a Fellow of both the Geological Society of London and the British Computer Society. He is a Chartered Engineer. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Irish Computer Society. He is a trustee emeritus (past secretary and vice-president) of the Endowment Board of the VLDB (Very Large Database) Conference, and is a member of the boards controlling the EDBT (Extending Database Technology) conference, CAiSE (Conference on Advanced Systems Engineering) and OOIS (Object-Oriented Information Systems) conference. He is a member of the SOFSEM Steering Committee. He is president of EuroCRIS and president of ERCIM. He holds the positions of Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Honorary Professor of Computer Science at University College of Wales, Cardiff, Honorary Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.

Dr Paulo Quaresma, Assistant Professor at the University of Evora, Portugal

Using ontologies and NLP techniques to improve health care information systems

Abstract
In this talk the use of ontologies to represent medical knowledge is analysed. Ontologies allow inferences and reasoning over the knowledge and they may represent an important step in the process of creating better health care information systems. Languages for describing ontologies, namely the OWL - Ontology web language, will be analysed and examples in the medical domain will be presented. In the second part of the talk, the use of natural language processing tools to interact with the health care information systems will be described. Namely, the use of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analysers, which are able to transform natural language queries into queries in the medical knowledge base will be presented.