National Library of Medicine researcher to lecture

Dr. Olivier Bodenreider of the National Library of Medicine will deliver the talk “From Terminology Integration to Information Integration” at 1:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27, in Room 214 of Manning Hall.

Bodenreider is visiting the School of Information and Library Science as part of the dissertation defense team of Ph.D. candidate Debbie Travers, who is defending her dissertation titled “Identification of concepts from emergency department text using natural language processing techniques and the UMLS.”

Bodenreider’s research interests include terminology, knowledge representation, and ontology in the biomedical domain, both from a theoretical perspective and in their application to natural language understanding, reasoning, information visualization, and interoperability.

In Monday’s lecture, Bodenreider will discuss a current research paper, the abstract of which follows: “There are currently over sixty biomedical terminologies of various scope and structure, designed to serve various purposes. While these terminologies are generally regarded as a source of biomedical vocabulary, they may also provide the basis for information integration, i.e., for linking disparate subdomains. Molecular biology will be used to illustrate how the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), a system that integrates many biomedical terminologies, may enable information integration. Two applications will be presented: GenesTrace, developed at Columbia University, and BioMeKe, developed at the University of Rennes, France.”

Bodrenreider is a staff scientist in the Cognitive Science Branch of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications at the National Library of Medicine. He obtained a M.D. degree from the University of Strasbourg, France in 1990 and a Ph.D. in medical informatics from the University of Nancy, France in 1993. Before joining NLM, he was an assistant professor for biostatistics and medical informatics at the University of Nancy, France, Medical School.