Hello from a semantics junkie !!!!

 

Hi,

 

My name is Vipul Kashyap and I have been some sort of a semantics
junkie/evangelist/believer 

right since the early days of my career as a computer scientist. Though
metadata, semantics 

and ontology-based approaches are currently gaining steam, various researchers
have been 

working along these lines for a long time. Some systems which I have been
associated with are:

 

The InfoHarness system, (with Amit Sheth and Leon Shklar) developed at Bellcore
(now known as Telcordia)

was a metadata-driven system for logically restructuring the information space.
GeoLens

(http://www.argreenhouse.com/geolens), VisualHarness and commercial products
such as Adept X/Harness, 

SmartCode/Metaphoria were built on top of this platform.

 

The OBSERVER system (http://sid.cps.unizar.es/OBSERVER) (with Eduardo Mena)
demonstrated the use of

independently developed ontologies (based on WordNet) to interrogate
independently developed data 

repositories (e.g., the Library of Congress and the Library of Monterrey)
storing information using 

different formats (e.g., MARC records) and supporting different information
access protocols (Z39.50). 

This was one of the earliest systems that used Description Logics (like OWL-DL)
for information integration and retrieval.

 

The InfoSleuth system (http://www.argreenhouse.com/InfoSleuth) demonstrated the
use of ontology and

semantics-aware agent communities for information gathering and analysis. I
worked on the ontology

agent that used OKBC protocol and KIF as the interchange language for expressing
ontologies.

 

The TaxaMiner system (http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/~cartic/taxaminer.htm)
demonstrated the use of NLP and

statistical techniques to bootstrap rough ontologies from medical research
articles from PubMed. We were

able to generate ontologies that approximated MeSH to a large extent.

 

My experiments and adventures with semantics made it clear to me that nowhere is
the need and alignment with

semantics so clear as with the HealthCare and Life Sciences information! And
besides, Biomedicine has

been one of the earliest users of semantics, courtesy, the Linneas Binomial
Classification of species !!!

This led me to a two year Research Fellowship at the National Library of
Medicine after which

I joined Partners HealthCare Systems as a Senior Medical Informatician.

 

I am currently working with Tonya Hongsermeier (co-chair, HCLSIG) on Clinical
Knowledge Management where

we are evaluating semantic web technologies such as OWL and RDF for
information/knowledge integration

and knowledge management. At Partners, we are actively exploring the business
value of semantic web

technologies and trying to roadmap their deployment into operational contexts.
In particular, we are developing

ways of messaging and articulating the value these technologies bring to various
business functions in the

context of healthcare delivery and translational medicine. We are also
collaborating with Mollie Ullman-Cullere,

Sandy Aronson, Raju Kucherlapati and Isaac Kohaane at the Harvard Partners
Center for Genetics and Genomics and exploring

possible collaborations with Mark Musen of the National Center for Biomedical
Ontology.

 

Finally, the groundswell of interest in this group has delighted the junkie in
me! We are getting lot more

co-conspirators, and mark my words, HealthCare and Life Science will do for the
Semantic Web what Physics did for the Web!

 

Look forward to working with you folks. Let's reach out for the chips, salsa and
beer ...

 

Let the party begin ... !!!

 

Semantically yours,

 

---Vipul Kashyap

 

=======================================

Vipul Kashyap

Senior Medical Informatician

Clinical Informatics R&D, Partners HealthCare System

Phone: (781)416-9254

Cell: (617)943-7120

http://www.partners.org/cird/staff.asp?stAb=vik 

 

To keep up you need the right answers; to get ahead you need the right questions

---John Browning and Spencer Reiss, Wired 6.04.95