Ontolog invited Speaker Presentation - Professor Mark A. Musen - Thu 2004-12-09    (4B4)

Conference Call Details    (4B5)

Attendees    (4BJ)

Agenda & Proceedings    (4C8)

http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/presentation/MarkMusen_20041209/mark_musen2.gif [Professor Mark A. Musen, MD Ph.D.]    (4CA)

Abstract of this Talk    (4CB)

Building electronic ontologies no longer is exclusively the province of philosophers or even that of computer scientists. Professionals of all kinds increasingly recognize the importance of creating explicit, formal models of the activities and objects with which they deal in their work and of the data that drive their decision making. In business, science, and government, there are burgeoning grassroots efforts to codify human knowledge fur purposes of document retrieval, data analysis, and decision support. These pragmatic efforts are enormously important to the professional communities from which they derive. They do not always adhere to standard conventions for domain modeling or knowledge representation, however.    (4CC)

In this talk, I will discuss certain grass-roots efforts to build ontologies and the effects that these efforts have had on their professional communities. There are obvious growing pains as workers most concerned about content knowledge learn to formalize that knowledge in a way that can facilitate automated information management and decision making. Professional societies, government agencies, and educational institutions can be enormously beneficial in providing resources to bolster these activities and to ensure that resulting ontologies are sound and maximally reusable. The advent of "the information society" requires the codification and dissemination of human knowledge in electronic form. The people who work closest to that knowledge are already taking major strides to build the necessary ontologies and knowledge resources.    (4CD)

Dr. Musen is Professor of Medicine (Medical Informatics) and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University, where he is head of the Stanford Medical Informatics laboratory. He holds an MD from Brown University and a PhD from Stanford.    (4CJ)

Dr. Musen conducts research related to intelligent systems, the Semantic Web, reusable ontologies and knowledge representations, and biomedical decision support. His long-standing work on a system known as Protégé has led to an open-source technology now used by thousands of developers around the world to build intelligent computer systems and new computer applications for e-commerce and the Semantic Web. He is known for his research of the application of intelligent computer systems to assist health-care workers in guideline-directed therapy and in management of clinical trials. Dr. Musen’s group has begun to explore the use of knowledge-based technologies to monitor a variety of data sources in an effort to detect incipient epidemics, including those caused by possible acts of bioterrorism.    (4CK)

In 1989 Dr. Musen received the Young Investigator Award for Research in Medical Knowledge Systems from the American Association of Medical Systems and Informatics. He received a Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1992. He has served on the Biomedical Library Review Committee of the National Library of Medicine and as an advisor to many academic and industrial groups concerned with the development of advanced information technology. Dr. Musen sits on the editorial boards of several journals related to medical informatics and computer science. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Medical Informatics (Springer-Verlag, 1997) and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Applied Ontology. (05/2004)    (4CL)

Session Recording of the MarkMusen Talk    (4CV)

 (Thanks to KurtConrad for his help with getting the session recorded.  -ppy)    (4CW)