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This may interest some of you Herewith a brief announcement of some software or potential interest to members of the openhealth list. Some additional comments follow the announcement. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Australian National University Data Mining Group, in collaboration with the Centre for Epidemiology and Research in the New South Wales Department of Health, is pleased to announce the first (alpha) release of prototype program code intended to make probabilistic record linkage easier, faster and more accurate for biomedical and other researchers. The programs, known collectively as "Febrl" - Freely Extensible Biomedical Record Linkage - currently address the data cleaning and standardisation tasks which are an essential first step for most record linkage projects, as well as providing a number of support functions for record linkage. The next release will include record linkage routines. Febrl, which is written is the free, open source Python programming language, is itself available under a free, open source license, which we hope will encourage others to contribute to its further development and support. Contact details, background information, documentation and, of course, the program code are all available from the project Web site at ? ? ? ? http://datamining.anu.edu.au/linkage.html We would like to stress that the programs are still in the early stages of development, and we do not yet recommend them for production use, but we encourage you to try them and to provide us with feedback. We particularly welcome bug reports and ideas for future development. There are many ways to help with the project: testing, programming and software engineering, testing, documentation and technical writing, testing, translation, testing, provision of (anonymous, non-confidential) training and example datasets, and testing (did we mention that already?). We look forward to hearing from you. Peter Christen and Tim Churches Principal Developers of Febrl ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Apart from being of interest to researchers working in fields such as population health, health services evaluation and genetic epidemiology, Febrl has the potential to become the core of a robust and scalable open source Patient Master Index (PMI) or Patient Identification System (PIDS). Although the first few releases will be aimed at researchers who mostly need batch processing facilities, we are engineering the software with online use in a community or population PIDS in mind, with access via various Web services and Grid computing interfaces. As noted above, this first release contains only some of the components of the complete system, which we hope to have available by the end of 2002 or early in 2003. Tim C -- From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/ -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.