| Office Line Engineering NV (OLE), Belgium |
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Office Line Engineering NV (OLE) was founded in 1989 in reflection of a twofold mission: the distribution of hardware and the development of software applications for comprehensive solutions. In 1993, the company was turned into an NV. Its mission was changed and focused more narrowly towards knowledge technology. Key activities at that time were pre-competitive research, consultancy, and the development of knowledge based systems and expert systems, especially in the domain of health care. In the domain of medical informatics, OLE has focused primarly on electronic healthcare records and clinical terminology. Without being a real developer of electronic healthcare record systems, the company has acquired a large expertise in that market in Belgium. Due to the company's involvement in many European R&D-projects, whether as main contractor, partner or sub-contractor, this expertise has been enlarged with respect to Europe as a whole. In addition, OLE has been heavily involved in the standardization activities of CEN/TC251, the Technical Committee of CEN dealing with Medical Telematics. Between 1995 and 1998, the knowledge based applications of OLE were entirely devoted to natural language processing in Healthcare. Strong emphasis was placed on the use of semantic disambiguation techniques early in the analysis process. Applications have been developed for Dutch, French and English, aimed mainly at supporting semantic encoding tasks related to medical expressions or full text reports. In 1998, all IPR related to medical natural language processing was used as an asset for the creation of Language & Computing NV (L&C) that has now grown to an international company with an office in Philadelphia. To date, OLE still delivers services to L&C related to natural language understanding. Meanwhile, OLE started up a new line of research related to Semantic Web Technology. Office Line Engineering NV (OLE) and its CEO Dr. Werner Ceusters have a long track and successful record in research and subsequent exploitation. Research has been conducted using both private equity and European funds. As can be seen from the company profile and the CEO's CV, this research has involved participation in 10 international research projects, many of which have been documented as having brought both social and economic benefits. In a social context, we can mention Ceusters' role in the EU Projects MEDIREC and EuroRec, on the basis of which he founded PROREC vzw, a Belgian non-profit organization that is currently the driving force behind medical telematics standardization and accreditation of medical software in Belgium and collaborates in this capacity with the Belgian Ministry of Health. Economic successes have been achieved in an early stage of OLE by equity and know-how participation in MediBridge NV (1993-1997), which is now market-leader in Belgium in the field of healthcare telematics, serving over 18.000 physicians. In 1998, OLE's research in natural language processing led to the creation of Language & Computing NV (L&C), a Belgian company that successfully markets its products in the United States. OLE will be led by CLOAKING . Webpage: http://www.office-line-engineering.be/ |