Biomedical information technology: from digital dawn to NGI

Presents an overview of the IT roadmap as we move from basic Internet to next-generation Internet (NGI) initiatives and from the information-centric to the knowledge-centric paradigm. Medicine and health care issues are discussed in light of these developments. With the continuing evolution of the numerous technologies and their support components, medicine and health care are in the midst of a major paradigm shift to embrace the Electronic Age. As these disciplines constantly generate new requirements, we stand poised to invent new protocols and technologies that support new problems. Over the past decade, the technology path has taken us through major infrastructure transitions. These developments have had significant impact on the R&D and information infrastructure aspects in biomedicine. While the Internet provides access to hundreds of thousands of globally distributed and heterogeneous information repositories and information resources, it is critical that we build an efficient information retrieval infrastructure to organize these distributed repositories into a coherent collection as well as manage the billions of digital objects that constitute these databases. Current research on digital libraries addresses such issues with the goals to efficiently capture, store, organize, search, process and retrieve knowledge from electronic collections containing text, images and multimedia clips. Intelligent integrated systems, knowledge management and data mining are areas that are currently being explored.