Intel’s Interest in Medical Terminology Translation
October 4, 2008
Intel continues to be a slippery fish when it comes to search and content processing. The ill fated Convera deal burned thorough millions in the early 2000s. Earlier this year, Intel pumped cash into Endeca, one of the two high profile enterprise search systems, known for their ecommerce and information access systems. (The other vendor is Autonomy. Fast Search & Transfer seems to be shifting from a vendor to an R&D role, but its trajectory remains unclear to me.)
Intel has one engineer thinking about language. The posting on an Intel Software Network Web log “Designing for Gray Scale: Under the Hood of Medical Terminology Translation” is suggestive. The author is Joshua Painter, who identifies himself with Intel. You can read this post here. Translation of scientific, technical, and medical terminology is somewhat easier than translating general business writing. The task is difficult, particularly when a large pharmaceutical company wants to monitor references to a drug’ formal and casual names in English and non-English document sets.
Mr. Painter’s write up concerns standards; specifically, “data standards in enabling interoperability in healthcare.” For me the interesting passage in this write up was:
An architecture for Health Information Exchange must accommodate choice and dealing with change – it must be designed for grayscale. This includes choice of medical vocabularies, messaging standards, and other terminology interchange considerations. In my last post I introduced the notion of a Common Terminology Services to deliver a set of capabilities in this space. In this post, I will discuss a technical architecture for enabling this.
The word grayscale, I think, means fuzziness. Intel makes these tantalizing pieces of information available, and I continue to watch for them. My hunch is that Intel wants to put some content centric operations in silicon. Imagine. Endeca on a multi core chip. So far this is speculation, but it is clear that juiced hardware can deliver some impressive content processing performance boosts. Exegy’s appliance demonstrates the value of this hardware angle.
Stephen Arnold, October 4, 2008
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