The project activities are being conducted in HF, UFMG and CoE (the latter during a sabbatical leave).

The HF, The State Center of Blood Transfusion and Hematology for Minas Gerais, Brazil, is one of the largest blood service organizations in Brazil and operates as a network, with centralized administration and technical coordination. It was founded in 1985 as part of an effort by the Brazilian government to improve standards of transfusion nation-wide.
Hemominas covers most of the transfusion activity in the state of Minas Gerais. The state is larger than continental France and its population of approximately 20 milion (2006) is distributed in almost 900 cities. The first Hemominas site was in Belo Horizonte, the capital (4.5 million people in the metropolitan area), with a blood collection facility and and outpatient care unit for the comprehensive treatment of hemophiliac patients.

Caring people is part of the history of HF. Since 1992, the foundation has been offering treatment and follow-up to patients with sickle-cell disease. This work was developed in 1998, with the pioneering establishment in Minas Gerais of the neonatal screening newborn screening test for phenylketonuria test (PKU) – a partnership between the State Health Secretary and the Center for Actions and the Center for Actions and Research in Diagnostic Support (School of Medicine, UFMG). From then on, as soon as the disease is detected, all children are referred to treatment in one of the 12 accredited units of the health network, with 100% of these patients with sickle-cell disease being treated.

More... Carneiro-Proieti, Ann Barbara; Cioffi, Junia G. Mourão. The Hemominas Foundation of Brazil: quality managment in a hybrid model. In Simpson, M. B. (Ed.). Strategies for Centralized Blood Services. Bethesda: AABB Press, 2006.

The Knowledge Representation, Ontologies and Language research group is composed of professors and researchers from UFMG, and comprehends distinctive fields of research like Information Science, Computer Science, Information Systems, and Linguistics. The group’s guidelines are in line with the interdisciplinary character of Information Science. The proposal is to connect classical Information Science theories to a reality featuring the constant evolution of information technology – data heterogeneity, new media, and formats, to mention but a few – and the diversity of social contexts in which information and knowledge are dealt with.

The research conducted inside the group emphasizes issues related to knowledge representation, ontologies and language. Moreover, the group applies up-to-date information technology resources in research involving content management systems, the Semantic Web, information architecture, information visualization, and natural language processing. The goal of this endeavor is to generate educational support for students – at both the undergraduate and the post-graduate levels - and to contribute towards social development by integrating the group’s efforts with those of public institutions.

Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics (CoE)

The CoE was created in Buffalo, New York in 2002 as part of more than $200 million dollars in investment from state, federal, industry and philanthropic sources to create a hub of life sciences expertise and innovation in Upstate New York. The COE includes over 100 scientists with biological, physical and computational expertise engaged in interdisciplinary translational research with COE collaborators.

The Informatics and Ontology reseach group, leaded by Barry Smith, develops powerful tools for information integration and reasoning in all domains of clinical and translational research, including clinical trial data management and electronic health records.