Health IT consortium formed

Biomedical informatics researchers at IBM and the Mayo Clinic have formed a new open source consortium focused on natural language processing, in an effort to help doctors share diagnosis and treatment information, according to PCWorld.

The Open Health Natural Language Processing Consortium will focus on technology to allow for large-scale data aggregation, allowing doctors to mine medical records in their specialties to find similar cases to study before making difficult diagnoses or before determining treatment.

Doctors will be able to review any physician notes on similar cases, but no personally identifiable patient information will be available in the database, IBM and Mayo say.

Microsoft has published its .NET architectural pattern under an OSI-approved open source licence to a mixed reception, reports The Register.

The company's ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC), released at Mix 09 just last month, has been published under the Microsoft Public Licence.

MVC is a design pattern that separates the business logic from the interface, and provides a recipe for quickly and efficiently building applications.

The German government has revealed that some of the EUR500 million it has earmarked for boosting the country's IT sector during the downturn will be directed towards boosting its open source software skills base, InformationAge reports.

The announcement reveals how the economic downturn is boosting support for open source software.

As emergency measures to prop up the economy give governments greater influence and ownership in industry, the European public sector's historic sympathy for open source is giving rise to greater investment, interest and legitimacy to the once-fringe software development model.