General Topics


Healthcare - the New Frontier for Rule Systems ( again )

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Feb 6 2009: Fair Isaac and ILOG Rules for COBOL.
Oct 20 2008: extracted from another article and expanded.

Every few years for the past 20 years, there has been an initiative to bring a higher level of information technology to the health care industry. It gives one a strong sense of having seen it all before.


Link - The Mother of All Flowcharts

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Think you've worked on some complex business applications ? Check out the flowchart for "Biochemical Pathways".


Link - Ontologies for Bioinformatics

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This article on ontologies in bioinformatics seeks to resolve problems in the standardization of nomenclature in the domain of biology and bioinformatics for text mining and data integration. While intended primarily for biotech, it is very concise and well-formulated and useful to anyone constructing an ontology.


Links - Ontologies and Organizations

The general definition of ontology at Wikipedia ( versus the computer science definition given in the main link ) is "a study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being". In some ways, the general definition is more appropriate to modeling organizations - the target audience for an organizational ontology is people, not computers.

The shortest and most intuitive definition of term ontology is 'a description of things that be'. For most purposes, it may be the best definition.


Links- Open Source / Open Content Initiative

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OReily - Open Source Open Content Paradigm Shift

" ... the open source story is far from over, and its lessons far from completely understood. Rather than thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story".