Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
from APIs, database data structures, operating system and network protocols, and user interface
design, to magnetic media formats and cable connector designs.
Achieving interoperability necessarily involves national and international standards organizations (see
Table 10-2
). Although organizations such as NIST may be peripherally involved in the data uniformity
stage of standards development, these organizations are intimately involved in achieving
interoperability. For example, in the digital imaging industry, which includes manufacturers of digital
cameras, flash-RAM, and developers of photo-editing software, interoperability is due to the work of
the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG). The JPEG
standard is recognized worldwide as a standard for compressing continuous-tone still images (digital
photographs), just as the MPEG standard is used for digital motion pictures. Many graphics
applications support several industry standards to maximize the odds of interoperability with other
graphics applications. For example, in addition to supporting its own proprietary file format, Adobe
Photoshop can import most of the graphics formats used by the most popular graphics applications
available for workstations. For the same reason, the RasMol molecular modeling program supports
data in graphics interface format (GIF), encapsulated PostScript (EPS), ASCII or raw, Windows
bitmap (BMP), Apple PICT, and Sun Rasterfile (RAST).
Table 10-2. Standards Organizations. In addition to this sampling of
standards organizations that affect bioinformatics, there are hundreds of
additional standards working committees that informally influence
standards.
ACR/NEMA
American College of Radiology/National Electronic Manufacturers Association
ANSI
American National Standards Institute
ASTM
American Society for Testing and Materials
CEN
European Committee for Standardization
EDIFACT
Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce, and Transport
EUCLIDES
European Clinical Data Exchange Standard
FCC
Federal Communications Commission
HCFA
Health Care Financing Administration
HHCC
Georgetown Home Health Classification
HIPAA
Heath Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
HISP
Healthcare Informatics Standards Board
IEC
International Electrotechnical Commission
IEEE
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
ISO
International Standards Organization
JPEG
Joint Photographic Experts Group
NANDA
North American Nursing Diagnosis Association
NIST
National Institute of Standards and Technology
OSI
Open Systems Interconnection
UCC
Uniform Code Council
Some standards are holdovers from previous systems that no longer exist. For example, GIF was
introduced in 1987 by the now-defunct CompuServe online service as a proprietary format. GIF
