Back on Track

Based on my previous blog and the feedback I've gotten, I can now set the direction in which I will be working. As stated before, I will investigate collaborative annotation methods which can be used as a step for the generation of an App as CDSS. However, I will no longer only focus on web-based annotation systems. After reading the FHIES article* by Van Gorp et al (2012) and a Skype meeting with my supervisor Pieter Van Gorp, it is now clear that it is better to also investigate other programs/platforms. Therefore, I will investigate 4 different methods which could be used to annotate different process-oriented models in healthcare (e.g. clinical guidelines).

The methods I will investigate are:

1)     GEM Cutter II

2)     EuGENia

3)     SHARE

4)     Web Annotation Tools

These methods are chosen based on the research of the above mentioned FHIES article and experience of Pieter Van Gorp. Since I am not familiar with these methods, I will have to investigate each one thoroughly. I will start by looking up general information and reading articles concerning these methods. After this I will also try to work with them to get a better feeling on how they actually work.

Eventually, I will try to argue which method is most applicable for the collaborative annotation of process-oriented models in healthcare. This decision will be made on yet to determine criteria.

*Full article name: 'MDE support for process-oriented health information systems: from theory to practice' by Van Gorp et al (2012)

Adjustment based on comment

It seems I have misunderstood the functionality of SHARE. I, therefore, want to restate the methods I will investigate. They will be of two different types:

1) SHARE-executed Desktop Tools:

     - GEM Cutter II

     - EuGENia

     - ...

2) Web Annotation Tools:

     - Diigo

     - Zotero

     - ...

Restart in Vienna

After lots of new impressions and nice experiences in and around Vienna, it is now definitely time to continue with my literature study. Because new beginnings are often hard, I have reread and inspected my previous work to get inspiration.

Inspiration came and I decided to take a different step than I described in my third blog. This because I first want to retrieve more information about Web annotation and its history. I think this will give me a good basis to think about the criteria for a suitable web-based annotation program.

To find articles I've used Google Scholar and I searched with the terms: Web Annotation, Web Annotation System and Annotation. The relevance of articles was determined by looking at the title, inspecting the abstract, and the number of citations. Furthermore, I took the year of publication into consideration. From this search I got 23 articles which seem to contain useful information. Furthermore, I found an interesting article while inspecting the wiki about Annotation on Wikipedia.

This makes a total of 24 articles about Web Annotation and Web Annotation Systems, which I want to inspect. However, just starting to read did not feel like a good idea. I wanted to make annotations and cross references along the way, work on multiple devices, and work in an orderly way. So, I need an Annotation program, but which one to choose?

Which Annotation programs are available? Which features do they have? Are they available for free? So my next search started. First, I started by looking for PDF annotators, because all articles are in PDF-format any way. This made me stumble on a really nice forum (astrobetter.com) which discussed PDF annotators for (astrophysical) articles. About 7 programs where discussed and one of them was Mendeley which has the feature of collaboration. This made me realize, I really want that feature in my program, since it is useful now and it will be useful later on as well when I need to decide on a program.

In the end I had a list of 11 annotators from which 5 have the possibility of collaboration:

•           Bluebeam Revu
•           Mendeley
•           Zotero
•           Qiqqa
•           EndNote

These programs I will investigate further: what are their features? What are the similarities? The differences? Then I’ll decide upon which one or two I will start to use and then the article reading starts…