BACKGROUND One of the national mortality databases in the U.S. is the Beneficiary Identification and Record Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) Death File that contains death dates of those who have received any benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The completeness of this database was shown to vary widely from cohort to cohort in previous studies. Three other sources of death dates are...

OBJECTIVE This work identified challenges associated with extraction and representation of medication-related information from publicly available electronic sources. METHODS We gained direct observational experience through creating and evaluating the Drug Evidence Base (DEB), a repository of drug indications and adverse effects (ADEs), and supplemented this through literature review. We extr...

The National Drug File Reference Terminology (NDF-RT) presents a large set of drug classes which can potentially be used in clincal settings. Using semantic web technologies such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework), the drug classes in NDF-RT were enriched for the purpose of comparison to themselves and to drug classes in other terminologies. Methods and...

This paper presents the design of Zebra, a striped network file system. Zebra applies ideas from log-structured file system (LFS) and RAID research to network file systems, resulting in a network file system that has scalable performance, uses its servers efficiently even when its applications are using small files, and provides high availability. Zebra stripes file data across multiple servers...

Objectives-This methods report provides an overview of how medication data were collected and processed in the 2004 National Nursing Home Survey (NNHS) and how analysts may use the medication data. The 2004 survey marked the first time that medication data were collected on sampled nursing home residents in the NNHS. Information about medications, which are an important component of nursing hom...

The National Software Reference Library (NSRL) of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) collects software from various sources and publishes file profiles computed from this software (such as MD5 and SHA-1 hashes) as a Reference Data Set (RDS) of information. The RDS can be used in the forensic examination of file systems, for example, to speed the process of identifyin...

In this article, we focus on the may_treat predicate linking drugs and disorders. Such predicate is expressed in RDF format in the VHA National Drug File Reference Terminology (NDF-RT), a specialized medical resource. The DailyMed dataset also contains this predicate, but only in textual form: for each drug there is an indication field that links the drug’s URI to a literal that is a long descr...