Wednesday, February 10 is the second official day of DHUG, and it kicks off with a bang.
Our keynote speaker, Dr. Moriba Jah, who hates being called “the garbage man of space,” opens the session. Dr. Jah is an astrodynamicist and one of the world’s premiere authorities on space debris, which consists of anything from a chip of paint floating in the ether to a defunct, broken down satellite. His work in monitoring, tracking, and cataloging this orbital detritus is fascinating and I can’t wait to hear what he has to say on this.
Dr. Jah is a tough act to follow, but if anybody can, it’s long-time DHUG attendee, Charlotte McNaughton, Director of Publishing Technologies at the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Charlotte spoke at last year’s DHUG about how ASCE uses Data Harmony’s XML Intranet System (XIS) as a repository for their metadata records as the back end for their Civil Engineering Knowledge Environment (CEKE). I don’t yet know what she’ll be speaking about this time around, but if last year is any indication, it’s going to be quite interesting.
Following Charlotte, we come back in house with Access Innovations’ president, Margie Hlava, who will be joined by crack programmer Dan Vasicek, to discuss an exciting development for scholarly publishers.
Unfortunately, there are issues with algorithmically generated articles that are being approved for publication. It’s not a lot of them, and it’s telling about what kind of pressure publishers are under, but it’s a problem. Fighting algorithms with algorithms, Dan has created a method for detecting these bogus submissions before they’re published. This is some really cool technology and, after Margie discusses the problem, Dan will explain how it works. I think the attendees (many of whom are in scholarly publishing, after all) are going to really like this one.
Up next is Justin Francom, a programmer with Innoventrum, whose subsidiary, Find-A-Code, we have partnered with to create IntegraCoder, a unique medical coding software application that enriches clinical documentation and helps medical practices get paid more efficiently. Justin, who I work closely with, will discuss the innovative ways that he integrated Find-A-Code’s medical coding data sets with the Data Harmony software to create what is truly a fantastic tool.
As the day begins to wind down, we’ll welcome Cindy Acton of Cargill to the stage. Cindy attended DHUG last year, and has been gracious enough to explain to the audience about how Cargill implemented Data Harmony in their content management tool, setting her on a journey to overhaul a taxonomy that contains over 9000 terms. Just hearing how she keeps all that straight will be extremely interesting to me and learning how she works with Data Harmony should be very enlightening for all the attendees.
Our final “official” speaker at DHUG will be our very own Vice President of Communications and Marketing, Heather Kotula. Heather will discuss an important and misunderstood aspect of what we do at Access Innovations: the return on investment. As I wrote last week, it’s pretty clear to most people who are using our software how it saves time and, in turn, money. It’s those that dole out that money who sometimes have difficulty understanding the ROI. It’s easy to understand why that’s the case, as information infrastructure is a much more esoteric concept than the bottom line and, if the value of that initial investment isn’t readily apparent, they’re not going to spend the money. Heather’s talk will be helpful for attendees with strategies to cogently explain the concept and how, by implementing informational infrastructure, a business will soon recoup that investment.
But after Heather’s talk, Wednesday’s not quite done. To close the show, Margie will return to the stage to answer questions from the audience (I’m sure there will be tons), address feedback both on the meeting and the software, and discuss the directions that Access Innovations will be going in the future. This is always interesting to hear about, since many of the changes that happen with Data Harmony during the year come directly out of this aspect of DHUG and we really can’t appreciate user feedback enough.
Thursday will be a little less busy, as we will say farewell to most of the attendees after Margie’s final address, but a few will stick around for a day of individual meetings and training. The personal nature of these dedicated sessions is great for education, of course, but it also helps us to build relationships with our users.
If you’d like to join us in sunny Albuquerque for a couple of days of highly interesting discussion, there’s still space, so sign up for DHUG and find out the myriad ways that our software is implemented. I can’t wait.
Daryl Loomis, Business Development
Access Innovations
