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ALSC - Your Development Agreement Partner

There are efforts underway, most notably in the clinical vocabulary market, to establish standard terminology data bases in order to help enterprises improve the comparability and accessibility of information in their respective fields of business. Just to give a few examples:

Medical Subject Headings
"The Medical Subject Headings comprise NLM's controlled vocabulary used for indexing articles, for cataloging books and other holdings, and for searching MeSH-indexed databases, including MEDLINE. MeSH terminology provides a consistent way to retrieve information that may use different terminology for the same concepts.
MeSH is a principal component vocabulary of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS®)

Apelon - language of e-health
"Apelon helps healthcare enterprises improve the comparability and accessibility of their clinical information. Whether you're maintaining a structured terminology, developing patient record applications, or delivering content over the web, our products and services help connect your customers to the information they need.

Are You Delivering What Your Visitors Need?
Does your site still think kidney failure is different than renal failure? That MI has nothing to do with heart attack? Make your customers' queries more effective (and your site more popular) with Apelon's new Concept-Based Indexing and Retrieval product line.

How Can Your Organization Best Apply Standard Terminology?
Using standard terminology effectively requires planning, knowledge, and experience. Join leading healthcare organizations such as the American Medical Association, HEALTHvision, Kaiser-Permanente, and SNOMED who use Apelon terminology services to improve their bottom line."

Development agreement of online consumer health records
"WellMed, Inc. and Lexical® Technology, Inc. today announced a new joint agreement to further the development of Web-based consumer health records. The two companies will collaborate to incorporate Lexical's Metaphrase® Enterprise Vocabulary System (EVS) into WellMed's HealthNow! online personal health record system. The companies are also jointly maintaining a unique consumer health vocabulary, the Consumer Health Terminology (CHT). This vocabulary, to be integrated with Lexical's Metaphrase Thesaurus, will make consumer health applications such as health records and searchable medical libraries more intuitive."

What should be clear from these excerpts is that the establishment of such standard (structured, controlled) data bases is not a trivial task, but (see above) requires "planning, knowledge, and experience". Any effort to establish such data bases across different languages is an even bigger task, since there is not always a 1:1 match. Nevertheless, in the case of medical treatments the language barrier has been conquered. Thus, it may be useful to create such data bases for other fields as well. ALSC is willing to enter into corresponding development agreements with interested parties. However, a word of caution: Remember that a controlled language is only good for a restricted field such as medicine, chemistry, or pharmacology. Any attempts to develop a "unique" language without narrowing down the target audience are doomed to fail because a "unique" term in a given subject field may be totally ambiguous when the application is not known.

Data bases are just one, yet "hot" example, where ALSC might enter into a customary development agreement rather than quote a fixed price. Clearly, because it will be impossible to anticipate all problems that might be encountered during such endeavors at the very beginning, any fixed price quote for a finished product would have to be skyrocketing high and any project with the slightest chance of being too ambitious may never be attempted in the first place. At best a forward-looking statement is possible. While the specifics will depend on the particular circumstances of each case, remuneration for development agreements has to be on an hourly (weekly/monthly) basis, with regular reevaluations of the target and any partial achievements at certain intervals and the customary option to extend a targeted deadline as needed.

ALSC is interested in your feedback. Do you agree/disagree?