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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/K42721/01
Title: PARALLEL ARCHITECTURES FOR ELECTRONIC PATIENT RECORDS
Principal Investigator: Goble, Professor C
Other Investigators:
Gurd, Professor JR
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Computer Science
Organisation: Victoria University of Manchester, The
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 October 1994 Ends: 31 December 1996 Value (£): 192,658
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Information & Knowledge Mgmt
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Creative Industries No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
To support smart semantic access to a large persistent classification-based knowledge store developed at Manchester (GRAIL). GRAIL is capable of representing asserted and implied intensional concepts for applications that require data models capable of supporting large, variable and complex schemas. To significantly improve the performance of the classification, sanctioning and consistency checking of new implied descriptive concepts by the application of coarse-grained parallelism and intelligent semantic indexing. To demonstrate the techniques by two industrial-strength pilots, one based on a specialist parallel architecture, the other using collections of workstations, for a clinical terminology server application. Progress:AdministrativeThe project is divided between the Centre for Novel Computing and the Medical Informatics Group both at Manchester; both have one RA. The CNC RA is concerned with the parallel algorithms and implementation; the MIG RA with the theoretical aspects and semantic indexing. The CNC RA is shared between two people both of whom joined the project on 01/10/94; both RAs are part-time with PAEPR and part-time with EU funded related projects; both were already in post with CNC and so only needed training in the application area. The MIG RA joined the project in January 1995, from the EU funded problem-holder project, having been instrumental in training the CNC staff on PAEPR, and requiring no induction period, keeping us on track with the original workplan. On 13/01/95 we had our first management meeting/technical workshop with HP, at Manchester. Technical:The five months of the project so far have been dedicated to: inducting the parallel architecture RAs in the knowledge representation formalism GRAIL; understanding the current (serial) implementation of GRAIL in Smalltalk/Objectworks 4; building an experimental C++ version for classification only and linking with the clinical terminology server engine; specification and creation of a test suite of concepts for trials; instrumenting the serial implementation for modelling and user applications, both batch and interactive, to uncover its classification behavioural characteristics; The next phase is to test the C++ version, and use the instrumentation results to begin experiments with a parallel version using a shared memory architecture. We begin a graph-theoretic specification of GRAIL to ensure that the parallel version behaves in a similar manner to the current serial version, and use the instrumentation and monitoring results for preliminary experiments in semantic indexing.
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