John W Rodat

All Payer Claims Datasets

June 17, 2011 States

About half the states have or are working on databases that encompass the bulk of claims for health services, both for hospital inpatient, ambulatory care, and pharmacy. It’s about time. Why’s that? Because it broadens policymaker’s perspective on what is actually happening in healthcare systems. For decades, most states have had databases that encompass all […]

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Europe’s Public Data

June 17, 2011 Government

Open European public data found here in a nice organized directory. As of this writing, it’s still a beta, but it already has 800,00 triples. Here’s the announcement. It’s tied to the Open Knowledge Foundation.

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Amazon’s First Hire

June 15, 2011 Business

Not sure that this story is a perfect fit here, but it’s still a good one. From Geekwire, Meet Amazon.com’s first employee: Shel Kaphan. And this should certainly count as a quote of the day as he describes made the work fun at the beginning: One of the things that attracted me in the first […]

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Cities are not as operationally diverse as they think

June 6, 2011 Cities

So, without knowing any of the details, this IBM strategy makes sense operationally and probably financially. I’m guessing it will make sense for enough cities to buy in though whether it will be enough to be a good business move, I’m not ready to say. From Fast Company, Smarter City in a Box: The Intelligent […]

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Semantic Web Based System for Expertise Search

June 3, 2011 Search

This “POPS” project used semantic web technologies (RDF and SPARQL). It’s from NASA/JPL, but no you don’t have to be a rocket scientist … I liked the criteria: The application aggregates data from three independently developed sources. The data is used in ways not originally intended (“serendipitous reuse”). The cost of aggregation is low, requiring […]

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Quote of the Day

June 3, 2011 Quote of the Day

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” — George Orwell

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NYT on the end of OBL and using all the data

May 17, 2011 Information

Delayed reaction here, but they did a nice job so I’ll post anyway. The New York Times received lots of reactions to the the killing of Osama Bin Laden and here’s how they displayed it. Note that all the structured data are quite visible so that that the viewer can see both concentrations and variability. […]

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(Lengthy) Quote of the Day

April 5, 2011 Quote of the Day

Carole Goble’s emphases are in the life sciences. But the lessons in Democratizing Informatics for the ‘Long Tail’ Scientist are both generic and important. Substitute your own domain. Semantic Web is the elephant to a blind man—everything to everybody. One of the prime pieces of the Semantic Web is the notion you could publish into […]

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If I could do this, anyone could

April 3, 2011 Computing

The Osborne Portable PC strained my eyesight but opened up a whole new world for me. When I figured out how to make it do something useful (with insurance data), I figured – no, KNEW – the world was going to change. After all, if I could do it, anyone could. Years later, I gave […]

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