CAM, understanding, wording and semantic dispersion

["David RR Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

I attended presentations here at NIH yesterday on the subject of knowledge management and Dr Barend Mons from the Netherlands said something very suscinct that encapsulates what I believe the whole CAM and prior work on BRIM is quintessentially focused on achieving:

 

The challenge is to normalize the semantic dispersion between information points and the associated processing systems.

 

Aligned with this is the fact that the KM community has also settled on using the UID concept to solve the riddle of semantic interoperability of terms, along with creating authoritative sources to manage those reference codelists.  They realized that word based systems are not enough since synonyms, homonyms and acronyms are too problematic:

 

e.g. Homonyms

 

PSA Prostate Specific Antigen

PSoriaticArthritis

alpha-2,8-PolySialic Acid

PolySubstanceAbuse

PicrylSulfonicAcid

Polymeric SilicicAcid

Partial Sensory Agnosia

Poultry Science Association

 

So while KM information alignment is mostly the domain of OWL, ontologies and such - there is a common thread revolving around registry use and establishing a common vocabulary.

 

I have updated the Kavi CAM welcome text to include this notion - my thanks to Dr Mons - and BTW - his presentations are well worth a look - just Google on his name - that in an of itself is an impressive instance of leveraging a unique knowledge identifier!! ; -)

 

Enjoy, DW