Integrating Biomedical Information: From eCell to ePatient - Proceedings of the European Federation for Medical Informatics Special Topic Conference 2006

Organisations in health care are moving into the information age since two or three decades. Never was the pace of this movement as fast as today. "Integrating Biomedical Information: from e-Cell to e-Patient", the title of this EFMI publication, indicates the broad spectrum of Medical Informatics. Both concepts in the title are new - the result of data collection, data processing and information analysis. It is expected this data and information to be the knowledge base for a better understanding of mankind and also to assist us in making information (evidence) based decisions in health care. We expect that this will give us a better perspective of the human body, its functions and that it will ultimately lead us to better health care. Recent developments in clinical terminology construction have brought together specialists from different disciplines, such as Medicine, Computer Science, Philosophy, and Linguistics. Different genres of clinical terminologies co-exist: the former distinction between formal terminologies, classifications, vocabularies, nomenclatures and thesauri is increasingly being challenged by the notion of "ontology".There are controversies between linguistic approaches (aiming at representing term meanings) and ontological ones (which strive for a representation of biomedical reality). There is also an increasing quest for "good practice" recommendations for biomedical terminologies.) This book is the third volume of the EFMI STC conferences. This series is a subseries of the MIR-conferences published by IOS Press.