ICD-10 – past and present

I am really excited and pleased by Peter Suber’s latest post. WHO converts a disease database to a wiki.
WHO adopts Wikipedia approach for key update, CBC News, May 2, 2007. Excerpt:

If the collaborative wiki process works for compiling an encyclopedia, couldn’t the same approach work for classifying all the diseases and injuries that afflict humankind? The World Health Organization thinks it can.
It is embarking on one of its periodic updates of a system of medical coding called the International Classification of Diseases, or ICD, and it wants the world’s help doing it.
While work on previous versions has been the domain of hand-picked experts, this time the Geneva-based global health agency is throwing open its portal to anyone who wants to weigh in on the revision….
The new, more open approach to updating the disease classifications won’t be entirely wiki-esque. That process, with its anyone-can-edit approach, builds a degree of vulnerability into the end product, with some contributors deliberately planting false information for the fun of it.
With the ICD, people can propose changes and argue for them on a WHO-sponsored blog. But groups of subject matter experts will weigh and synthesize the suggestions, said [Robert Jakob, the WHO medical officer responsible for the ICD]….

OK, the WHO is a good thing and I’m very keen on Open collaborative science and medicine but there is a special aspect. For several years I worked on ICD-10 to convert it to XML – before most people had ever heard of it. ICD-10 has thousands of diseases in a hierarchical classification and a code for each. Nowadays it would pprobably be called an ontology.
Lesley West and I created a DTD to hold the ICD-10 and other dictionaries – we called our approach the “Virtual Hyperglossary”. We created a company to produce information products for the pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory process in which ICD-10 and other terminologies were important.
How naive our efforts look now! We used a DTD rather than a schema. We didn’t have language processing tools to make the translation of the scanned material better structured.We used ISO-12620 as the basis – and I spent time on the ISO meetings. Pace was often slow. But at the time it was ahead of its time.
Most things in the brave new world don’t make it – the VHG was one such. There are lots of others. I’ve moved a long way since then. But some of what we are doing now will make it and change the face of scholarship. We have only just started.

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