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Presenter: John Gennari - Assistant Professor, Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics, University of Washington, U.S.A.
Supervisor: Dr. M. Storey - Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department

Date: Fri, September 5, 2003
Time: 13:30:00 - 14:30:00
Place: Centre of Innovative Teaching Building (CIT), Room 116

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT:

Although there are a number of "groupware" products and research tools available, many groups have difficulty adapting these technologies to their specific work practices. We believe that many of these tools fail to provide appropriate awareness capabilities, especially when different users or members of the collaborative group have different roles within the organization. Awareness leads to better communication, which can be a crucial element of success for a group of co-authors who are producing a complex technical document. As a concrete example, we are designing a collaborative authoring system for clinical trial protocols.

In medical research, the design and authoring of large-scale, multi-site protocols is an expensive, time-consuming process. The end result is a document that has been authored by a number of different medical experts and administrators over a period of 4 to 9 months. Protocol authors are geographically distributed, and there are at least three distinct types of authors (roles) who apply particular sorts of expertise to the task of creating a safe and scientifically valid clinical trial protocol.

In this setting, a lack of awareness has led to a number of communication problems and delays as co-authors build the document over time. In collaboration with the Southwest Oncology Group, a cooperative for developing cancer protocols, we have been designing a web-based document authoring and reviewing system to help address these issues. Our system uses a variety of mechanisms for awareness, and incorporates knowledge about document versions and comment meta-information. We believe our system will improve communication, reduce delays, and reduce errors in the resulting document, thereby improving both the quality and the efficiency of the work.

Biography:

Dr. John Gennari received his computer science Ph.D. in machine learning from UC-Irvine in 1990. He received his medical informatics training at Stanford medical informatics, where he was one of the early designers and builders of the Protege environment for knowledge based systems development. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Dep't of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Washington. His current knowledge-based research is in knowledge sharing and ontology alignment; his medical domains of interest are cancer research and anatomy. Dr. Gennari is co-chair (with Bruce Porter) of this year's International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP '03).