Monday, March 04, 2013

Human Action in the Healthcare Domain



An essay by Barry Smith, Lowell Vizenor and Werner Ceusters on the current state of the RIM, entitled 


“Human Action in the Healthcare Domain: A Critical Analysis of HL7’s Reference Information Model” 

has now been published in a Festschrift for Ingvar Johansson. The essay is available online here.


1 comment:

Tom Leith said...

I tripped over your “Human Action in the Healthcare Domain” yesterday.

I’m an old computer programmer – more on the crafty end of the “craft” <==> “engineering” spectrum. I’ve always said good systems come from good philosophy but this falls on deaf ears today, as it did yesterday, but it wasn’t as bad when the likes of Kay, Goldberg, Hopper, Wirth, and (thoughtful) pragmatists like Kernigan and Plauger were “heroes”.

Here I think is my favorite: ‘a dead human corpse is still essentially a living subject’.

No!!!!!! But then I’m an old-fashioned Catholic who thinks Aquinas had a lot on the ball and that contradiction is unreasonable.

Good on you bringing a philosophical (Chomsky-esque?) approach to analysis in medical informatics, and evidently a classical approach (who today even knows what “ontology” means?) Maybe someone will listen. It isn’t likely, but maybe.