An analogy is that it provides a dictionary and grammar for medical concepts rather than attempting to enumerate a universal phrase book of all possible medical concepts. One can use the dictionary and grammar to construct specialised phrase books - i.e. coding schemes - and to build indexes - i.e. classifications - for any such phase books. Furthermore, any number of different phrase books can be constructed and their contents related through the original grammar and dictionary - the GALEN Common Reference Model. Unlike an enumerate phrase book or coding system, the total number and complexity of terms is not fixed in advance.

In fact, GALEN’s approach is much more powerful than the analogy with a dictionary and grammar would suggest. The power of GALEN’s formal reference models allows many other questions to be answered, e.g. “Do these two phrases mean the same thing”, “Is one thing a kind of another”, “What else can one say about the thing described”. These functions are increasingly required by decision support and advanced integration systems.

GALEN packages the model together with the software to access it in ‘terminology servers’ which make its functions available to applications without the applications builders having to understand the internal details of GALEN’s technology. Recently, partly as a result of GALEN’s success, the idea of Terminology Servers has been the object of considerable interest in the Medical Informatics community. An RFP for terminology services has been issued by CorbaMed, and GALEN has participated in formulating one of the responses.

Purpose and objectives

1. To demonstrate a European telematic infrastructure for co-operative management of terminologies by:
   • Developing a European Common Reference Model for Surgical Procedures using the GALEN technologies and tools in cooperation with four participating national centres of coding and classification
   • Using the common Common Reference Model and telematic tools to harmonise and develop national classifications for procedures in a further five centres during the final year of the project. (A additional three centres have recently decided to co-operate at their own expense.)
2. To demonstrate the use of the Common Reference Model in data entry and authoring systems for clinical systems by:
   • Evaluating clinical products using the GALEN technology, largely developed with funds from non-EU sources, in General Practice in the UK, Diabetes care in Germany, and Surgical reporting in Finland.
   • Collaborating with the PRESTIGE project to develop tools which use the GALEN model as a source for terminology for their Protocol Authoring Tool.

Results

1. Tools for staff developing or integrating classifications or specialised terminologies:
   • the Classification Workbench for workers in the classification centres including tools for mapping to and from existing classifications and for re-organising classifications along alternative axes
   • the integration environment for those harmonising the work of the centres.
   • multilingual language generation, so that the results can be viewed in whichever language is required (Currently supported are English, Dutch, French, and German. Finish and Greek are under development.) The tools include generalised grammar allowing new languages to be added in a few person-weeks work.
2. The Common Reference Models
   • The underlying Common Reference Model including an extensive model of human anatomy;
   • The Common Reference Model for Surgical Procedures
3. Specialist classifications developed by individual national centres
   • The GALEN technology is being used extensively in the development of the new French national classification of procedures
   • Contributions to the Dutch, Swedish, Belgian and Greek classifications of procedures.
4. Demonstrations and evaluations of clinical systems using the GALEN technology. In addition the GALEN technology has been a key contributor to the development of three small companies selling products using its technology in Switzerland, the Benelux, and the UK. The consortium has formed the GALEN Organisation Limited to take the technology forward to support these companies and provide means for wider commercial exploitation.

List of deliverables

Year 1

• Report on initial workshops: detailed plan of activities for the participating and collaborating centres and priorities (month 9, Restricted)

Year 2

• Demonstration of the use of GALEN-IN-USE in UK general practice including evaluation report (month 14, Restricted)
• Extended CORE Model for representation of the Common Reference Model for procedures (18, Restricted)
• Preliminary demonstration of GALEN-IN-USE in data entry for diabetic care (month 18, Restricted)
• Requirements study of use of Common Reference Model for data entry for surgical care (month 19, Restricted)
• Classification Manager (ClaM-IV) Delivery platform and Knowledge Acquisition tools for EFCC and Collaborating Centres (month 19, Restricted)
• Improved natural language text generator (month 19,Restricted)
• The Common Reference Model for Procedures (month 24, Restricted)

Year 3

• TELE-KNOME knowledge management and version control environment with telematic support (month 25, Restricted)
• Detailed Further Exploitation Plan (month 30, Restricted)
• Demonstration of combined scenario with SYNAPSES (month 30, Restricted)
• Demonstration of GP-DIABETES and ByMediks/Telepresence system using GALEN-IN-USE, including evaluation and exploitation report (month 36, Restricted)
• Report on the usability of the Common Reference Model for Procedures in a surgical data entry system (month 36, Restricted)
• Final Conference Report (month 36, public)
• Demonstration of the telematic infrastructure for a common resource for medical terminology and language for Europe including the the designated segments of national classifications (month 36, public)

List of participants

	Copyright 1998 © EHTO All rights reserved This server is the only official EHTO WWW knowledge repository. Mail suggestions to: webmaster@ehto.org