

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Nurses as modellers and informaticians: surely not!

Nursing is still trying to escape and evade the sexual 'Carry On' stereotypes that have plagued the profession in the popular imagination. For the majority of people talk of nursing and models more readily conjures up visions of catwalks than an academic pursuit.

You can still see and hear the response of bright-eyed girls and boys (aged 9-10...) to the age-old question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The answer: "I want to be a nurse and help people get better!" Even though youngsters are more sophisticated these days (the reference to girls and boys is not just me being politically correct), they are still most likely primarily motivated by humanistic leanings as opposed to wanting to pursue the necessary studies in the sciences.

Despite efforts worldwide practicing nurses do not all see themselves as data modellers enthralled by IcT. IT isn't usually why they came to nursing, although many mature students may have started their career in the IT sector. Chapter 1 of Programming the Semantic Web highlights how a basic table is a model (p.6-7). So of course gifted with natural language we are all data modellers. Hodges model then is the ubiquitous high-level data model - a two-by-two table and a whole lot more.

An invitation to mine data, gather information and deliver nuggets of knowledge.

Programming the Semantic Web: Build Flexible Applications with Graph Data
By Toby Segaran, Colin Evans, Jamie Taylor
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Released: July 2009

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