Transcript: DBTB INT Brian Carlsen r

[Music] my name is Brian Carlson i'm the founder and i'm a senior informatics consultant for west coast informatics well we try to talk about the umls which is a product of the National Library of Medicine that's a giant thesaurus of medical terminologies and it's a project that's dear to my heart because I've worked on it for many years for a while at the NLM and now i'm sort of a user of it and it's always an interesting thing to be able to share our experiences and knowledge about it with people who could benefit from using it who don't know about it and then you know to kind of get into all the messy details of you know what makes it wonderful and awful [Music] well I think that it's become clear that everything is data or there's data about everything and you know so much of when I watch TV or hear people talk so much of what frustrates me about the nature of conversations between people has to do with the fact that people express their opinions as if they were facts and I think it's becoming clearer and clearer that that is not as relevant a thing to do anymore because there's almost always some actual data behind it that could answer the question and we don't have to just rely on something someone's grandmother said 80 years ago [Music] I think so our talk was about how open data is similar and different from open software open source data open source software and I think the key takeaway is that in order to achieve all the things that we want to be able to achieve with data some aspect of that is going to require open source data to be part of that world and there is already a great movement the federal government and state governments are doing an excellent job of releasing all manner of public data that is paid for by the taxpayers and essentially owned by us but has been kept behind locked doors for many years and so I think the discipline and the approaches that made open source software successful are directly relevant to making open data successful and maximizing its value I think everyone has thought something like I wonder how many times my heart has since I was born or how many steps have I taken and so I would say like just in your own life start to realize all of the things that you do our data points every interaction that you have with something else whether you're there or not how many minutes you sleep every night you know how many calories you eat during the day how many dishes you've broken in the last year and I think it's just inspiring when you really realize how much of your life you could visualize if you actually just knew the details of what it was and you know look use the creative energy about to find the data that you're passionate about and do something with it you [Music]