1. Acknowledgments

This project is funded by the Australian National University (ANU) and the NSW Department of Health under an AICS (ANU-Industry Collaboration Scheme) AICS #1-2001. Additional funding is provided by the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC). The authors would like to thank everybody who supported this project and helped to make it happen: Markus Hegland, Ole Nielsen, Stephen Roberts and David Bulbeck. We are specially grateful to Justin Xi Zhu (former honours student at the ANU Department of Computer Science) for his recognition of the potential of hidden Markov models in data standardisation and his documentation of the rule based name standardisation (Appendix C), and to Kim Lim and Alan Willmore (Centre for Epidemiology and Research, NSW Department of Health) for their input into the design of the software and in helping to test and debug it.

We would also like to thank Peter Viechnicki (Vredenburg Corp., Lanham, MD), Rohan Baxter (CSIRO, Canberra) and Daniel R. Sabath (Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, Seattle), Mike Berry (HIN) for their feedback and contributions, and all other users of Febrl who sent us bug-reports or other comments.