The eyeGENE database, launched in 2006, collects genotype and phenotype information for patients with eye diseases as a tool to further eye research.

We will develop a component that contains in a machine understandable way all the domain knowledge that is required to be able to prevent, predict, detect or deal appropriately with RAPS in the context of the disease history of a patient.

The John R. Oishei Foundation authorized a grant to establish at SUNY at Buffalo (UB) a Taskforce for Ontology-Based IT Support for Large-Scale Studies in Psychiatry.

The application of Referent Tracking in various domains will be presented during the 'Identity, Identifiers and Identification' Workshop in relation to WWW2007, Banff, Canada, May 8, 2007.

The principles of Referent Tracking were well accepted by the audience of the Ontology for the Intelligence Community workshop. The slides of Ceusters' presentation can now be downloaded.

The application of Referent Tracking and the ontological theory from which it originates has been explained in various contexts. Slides from these presentations are available: Disease Ontology Workshop, the AMIA-2006 Image Ontology Workshop, the Panel on the future of HL7, FOIS-2006 (draft paper) and AMIA-2006 (draft paper).

During her keynote speech at KR-MED in Baltimore, MD, Nov 8 2006, Betsy Humphreys, Deputy Director of the National Library of Medicine, referring to our JBI-paper, publicly expressed her belief in the value of assigning unique identifiers to salient entities in reality.

We welcome Shahid Manzoor in our team.

We welcome Ron Rudnicki in our team.

We have been notified of the acceptance of several papers:

Ceusters W, Smith B. Referent Tracking for Digital Rights Management. Forthcoming in International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies (draft).

Ceusters W, Smith B. A Realism-Based Approach to the Evolution of Biomedical Ontologies. Forthcoming in Proceedings of AMIA 2006, Washington DC, November 11-15, 2006. (draft)

Referent Tracking in HL7. AMIA 2006, Panel on The future of HL7, Washington DC, November 11-15, 2006. (a panel presentation rather than a paper)

IFOMIS and NCBO organized earlier this week a Training Course in Biomedical Ontology at Schloss Dagstuhl. Two presentations were focused on Referent Tracking:

Referent Tracking: The New Paradigm (slides 5.6Mb) and

Ontology and the Future of Evidence-Based Medicine (slides 1.2Mb).
Also the presentation Role of Terminologies and Ontologies in the Context of Electronic Health Records (slides 3.7Mb) may be of interest to understand better the benefits of referent tracking.

At an international symposium held May 5-6, 2006 at UB, clinical guideline algorithm developers and informatics researchers explored the diffusion of evidence-based mental health treatment information for use throughout the world.
Psychiatric practice guidelines are intended to assist psychiatrists in clinical decision-making and to improve patient care. Guidelines are decision support tools which need not to be followed although failure to follow guidelines may have medicolegal consequences.
Unfortunately, applying clinical guidelines in daily practice is not an easy task, and this for many reasons. First, guidelines should be easily accessible, since failure to ensure that they are used has been shown to result in differences in outcomes in mental health care delivery. Second, ways need to be find to overcome the difficulties faced when the attempt is made to gather the information required to assess compliance with guidelines. Third, it must be pointed out that even if the required data were available, it would still remain difficult to assess whether a given guideline is to be applied. Entry points or decision nodes in guidelines are often based on the notions of disease and diagnosis, but the validity of these very notions is both from an ontological and epistemological point of view still the subject of debate in psychiatry. Another problem is the lack of coverage of the guidelines themselves, and their failure to provide answers to complex clinical questions. This problem is compounded by the fact that guidelines may overlap, especially when patients suffer from multiple diseases. The latter calls for a corresponding set of integrated ‘meta-guidelines’ that combine the contents of individual practice guidelines in coherent fashion. Finally, it has been shown that clinicians tend to overestimate their adherence to guidelines.
In order to make practice guidelines practically useful, they need to be available in algorithmic and executable form and seamlessly integrated with electronic health record (EHR) and practice management systems. But guidelines are developed independently of such systems, and both guidelines and the systems themselves manifest considerable diversity. Hence it is far from trivial to use data stored in the latter automatically as input for the former. This calls for some form of translation, which (despite efforts in syntactic regimentation such as GLIF) is hampered by the absence on either side of clear mechanisms indicating what terms in guidelines and data in EHR systems actually refer to.
It seems obvious to us that unqualified realism, the philosophical theory of ontology that forms the foundations of referent tracking, is able to provide for these mechanisms. This is a route we will explore in the near future, more specifically the development of software agents that monitor the referent tracking database for trigger events suggested by guidelines.

I recently finished reading the first version of the book Data and Reality by William Kent, written in 1978. It was amazing to find out how many of Kent's ideas were close to those of referent tracking, the central issue being the use of representatives in data records to make explicit reference to the entities in the real word about which data are collected. These representatives are what we call IUIs. That idea itself, Kent writes, was also already proposed by other authors and one of the things I need to do now is to track them down.
In the book, Kent raises many of the questions that are highly relevant for developing a referent tracking system. Surprisingly, he had more questions than answers, and one can only wonder what the reasons were. I wanted him to ask this, but then I discovered he sadly passed away recently. One clue, who knows, might be two conflicting arguments on his side, the first one being "This book projects a philosophy that life and reality are at bottom amorphous, disordered, contradictory, inconsistent, non-rational, and non-objective", and the second one that "Rational views of the universe are idealized models which only approximate reality". So did or did he not believe in an independent reality that, how difficult or perhaps impossible it might be to describe, is nevertheless something we can have access to ? Although he obviously was aware of the difference between what there is, and what we (can) know that there is, he did not take that into account in all passages of the book.
Without doubt, those involved in information modeling that find the ideas of referent tracking unattractive might start to think otherwise after having read Kent's book.

The paper Ceusters W, Elkin P, Smith B, Referent Tracking: The Problem of Negative Findings has been accepted for oral presentation during the MIE 2006 conference in Maastricht.

We have installed a Discussion Group for Referent Tracking. The homepage is http://groups.google.com/group/Referent-Tracking. Instructions to participate can be found there.