Introductions: John Madden, Duke U & SNOMED Int'l

Hi Everyone,

It's wonderful to see all the smart and creative people whose introductions
are filling my inbox.

I'm an Associate Professor of Pathology at Duke University Medical Center.
I'm a full-time diagnostic surgical pathologist with a special interest in
genitourinary pathology. I've been active in medical informatics for 10 or
15 years. Here at Duke, I'm the Medical Director for Informatics of Duke
Health System Laboratories. I'm also co-chair of the new HL7 Pathology SIG.
Before coming to pathology, I was a protein biochemist.

I've been a member of the Editorial Board of SNOMED International for going
on 5 years, and I've been asked to take on a liaison role for SNOMED to this
group (not to exclude the likelihood of other SNOMED'ers also joining in).

Of course as you might imagine, one of my interests is in medical
ontologies/vocabularies. There is much wonderful content in SNOMED, and
there is also lots of exciting work that needs to be done to make that
content accessible according to web standards. At an even more fundamental
level, I'm very committed to technologies that will help our community
negotiate a transformation from the notion of "controlled vocabularies" of
medicine to notions of distributed and federated medical ontology-building
and sharing.

My interests also cover document standards for Electronic Medical Records
and clinical data exchange. I've worked a good deal with the HL7v3 Clinical
Document Architecture; however I'm very nondogmatic and especially bullish
on OASIS document and schema standards including DocBook, OpenDocument and
the DSDL suite for health enterprise document exchange. For all these
standards, there's much technical work yet to be done on metadata embedding
techniques, particularly of RDF-family language content. This is a special
interest of mine (RDF embedding in schematized document content), and I'm
delighted to contemplate tapping all the fantastic experience of W3C members
in the area of RDF in (X)HTML.

Finally, I'm a devotee of the notion of "forms" (a.k.a. templates, etc.) in
medicine, and I love the way forms constitute a mediating entity between
structural and conceptual realms. As such, I think forms are a central
concept in mediating between the notion of a document as a concrete object,
and document as an expression of a thought. So, I'm a fan of Xforms
integration into document schema standards, and of integration of forms
technology and metadata technology.

That's about it for me. I'm greatly looking forward to participating in the
group.

John

--------------------------------
John F. Madden, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Pathology
Duke University Medical Center
Box 3712
Room 3105 South Hospital Yellow
Durham, NC 27710-3712

Received on Thursday, 1 December 2005 22:18:49 UTC