paolo ciccarese
Biomedical scientist, knowledge architect, software engineer
Biomedical scientist, knowledge architect, software engineer
I began my scientific career in 2000, investigating methods for formal representation of computerized clinical practice guidelines. As part of my doctorate, at the University of Pavia (Italy), under the mentorship of professors Mario Stefanelli and Silvana Quaglini, I designed and co-developed a guideline-based decision support system named 'The Guide Project', which combined guideline decision support with the power of clinical workflow management systems. I have been initially focusing on the pathologies of 'Stroke', 'Hypertension' and 'Heart failure'. Later on, I have also been dealing with 'Cancer' and 'Amyloidosis'. The Guide Project is the topic of several publications and has been mentioned multiple times in the books such as Clinical Decision Support: The Road Ahead by Robert A. Greenes *.
The Guide platform has been deployed in the Trentino county (Italy) for heart-failure management and for Lombardia county (Italy) oncological network for managing the treatment of several oncological diseases. An additional prototype has been developed - under the guidance of Prof. Giampaolo Merlini - for the Italian Network of Amyloidosis together with a web portal and an electronic system from collecting patient data across the Italian territory.
While carring out my doctorate work, I did not take long to realize how the use of logic and semantic technologies could have been beneficial for both guidelines representation and guidelines integration with existing clinical information systems where patient data are mostly unstructured and hard to interpret automatically.
In 2004, I started exploring the emerging Semantic Web technologies. Towards the end of that year, I visited my dear friend Stefano Mazzocchi at the time working at the SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) project at MIT. As a result, in the following year, we co-developed Welkin an open-source graph-based RDF visualizer covered also by Slashdot. Under the same umbrella we also co-developed Vicino, a library to perform nearest neighbor searching and clustering later incuded in Freebase Gridworks (now Google Refine). Because of this contributions, I got to know Eric Miller - at the time lead of the Semantic Web initiative at W3C and now president of Zepheira, Inc. - and MacKenzie Smith - Research Director at MIT Libraries and now Creative Commons. I also visited the W3C offices in Cambridge for the first time. Even if limited to my spare time, the SIMILE experience has been certainly one of the most gratifying of those years and eventually the main reason why I ended up in Boston later on.
Meanwhile, in 2005 in Belgium, I co-funded a start-up company named Medicognos with the aim of bringing the clinical information systems to the level of functionality and usability required by the busy physicians for sustaining their daily effort to ensure the best quality care for their patients and the sustainability of the healthcare system. In other words, the idea was to realize a shift from the old problem oriented medical record paradigm to a clinical knowledge and process management platform.
In September 2006, I accepted a part-time position of post doctoral research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School under the direction of Tim Clark, director of the MIND Informatics group. For the first 15 months I held my position of a teaching assistant at the Univeristy of Pavia as well and I spent half of my time in Italy developing the open source Java Data Processing Framework (JDPF) and half in Boston develping Semantic Web Application in Neuromedicine (SWAN). Since January 2008, I hold a full-time position as faculty (Instructor of Neurology) at the Harvard Medical School and I live in Boston.
Since mid 2008, I became very active in the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) Interest Group and particularly in the Scientiic Discourse sub-task where I've been responsible for several activities including: scientific discourse formalization, integration of SWAN and SIOC ontologies, integration of SWAN and CiTO ontologies and coarse-grained rhetorical structure. I am the editor of three W3C Interest Group Notes and I am currently responsible for the annotation activity.
In the last few years, I have been increasingly focusing on enabling personal and community-driven knowledge acquisition, curation and sharing. I am currently exploring the use of Annotation of digital resources for supporting the knowledge creation process. I authored the Annotation Ontology (AO) - an OWL vocabulary for representing and sharing annotation of digital resources and their fragments - and I am developing Domeo, a web application for semantically annotating online documents. In March 2011 I randomly met Phil Desenne (Harvard University) that, since several years, is pursuing very similar goals in the pedagogical area. We are now promoting the idea of creating a platform for implementing federated annotation within Harvard University.
Since December 2011 I am co-chairing the W3C Open Annotation Community Group whose purpose is to work towards a common, RDF-based, specification for annotating digital resources. The group first task is the reconciliation of AO with the Open Annotation Model.
* When Greenes published the book, he was working for Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Unfortunately, Greenes moved to the University of Arizona right after I moved to Boston and I never got to meet him in person.