InfoD-Cafe: Arntz 1930 - Medical icons 2008

[Karel van der Waarde]

Dear all,

Jane Teather (CRI-fellow, IDA-UK) just send me a 
reference to an article about the use of icons in 
medicines information.


The article itself is: "An iconic language for 
the graphical representation of medical concepts" 
[BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 
2008, 8:16.; Authors: Jean-Baptiste Lamy, 
Catherine Duclos, Avner Bar-Hen, Patrick Ouvrard, 
Alain Venot.]


The manual describing the "VCM language" is available from:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/imedia/1716336701667053/supp1.pdf
(VCM stands for 'Visualisation des Connaissances Médicales'.

It is 'to be used to represent medical knowledge 
with icons. The objective is not to replace 
medical texts entirely by icons, but rather to 
combine texts and icons, using icons to enable 
the user to localize pieces of text of interest 
more rapidly, e.g. during a medical consultation.'

The authors claim that they have studied Neurath, 
Bliss and Bertin. Have a look at their beauty and 
admire the results ...

Is there a need to compare these with the symbols 
made by Gerd Arntz about 80 years ago? 
http://www.gerdarntz.org/home


Kind regards,
Karel.
waarde at glo.be