First European Conference on SNOMED CT
organised by the Network of Excellence Semantic Mining

Background

The vision of a universal clinical terminology, covering a broad range of health-related domains and meeting the needs of all health professionals has stimulated numerous health informatics research activities in the last two decades.

During this period, SNOMED grew from a pathology-centered vocabulary to a comprehensive clinical terminology. SNOMED Clinical Terms (CT), is the result of a joint development between the UK NHS and the College of American Pathologists (CAP).

Some countries and organizations have already licensed SNOMED CT, and there is an increasing awareness of SNOMED development and implementation all over the world. Still there are only few prototypical implementations of SNOMED CT in clinical settings, and there are many concerns about the feasibility of such a comprehensive terminology as basis for the whole health delivery process.

The Semantic Mining Conference on SNOMED CT, organized by the EU Network of Excellence "Semantic Interoperability and Data Mining in Biomedicine" will be the first European forum for health policy makers, clinicians, nurses, system developers, computer scientists, terminologists and translators.

A number of prominent invited speakers will provide an overview of current efforts and developments in the context of SNOMED CT.

Focus

The aim of SMCS2006 is to provide a forum for discussing achievements and actual experiences with reference terminology, framework, terminology contents and organizational issues in relation to SNOMED CT®.The approach will be cross-disciplinary based on tutorials and plenary sessions. The topics addressed include formal and ontological aspects of SNOMED CT, mapping between SNOMED CT and legacy terminologies and classifications, partial and local use of SNOMED, SNOMED and the Electronic Health Record, questions of terminology maintenance, SNOMED and nursing terminology, SNOMED support for Coding and epidemiology, SNOMED viewers and browsing tools, worldwide semantic interoperability, translation issues, terminological standards, clinical use cases, SNOMED in life science research, and post-coordination in practice.

Registration

It will be possible to register on-site. The Conference Fee will still be € 200, even if the conference dinner is fully occupied at the time of registration. We can unfortunately not guarantee accommodation at a late registration.