Jan Roukens

From Rutgers Medical Informatics History Project

Dr. Roukens presents 'Towards a Linguistic World Order'
at the European Association for Terminology (EAFT)
Summit in Brussels, November 2006
(Source: http://www.eleto.gr/)

"Roukens was deeply involved with the transition from the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP-TC4) to IMIA. Increasingly, medical computing became a field where the computer and medical worlds met, and IMIA was established to meet the needs of proffessionals from both.

National member societies from around the the globe were offered seats on the Board. The European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) was established to accommodate regionalization by allowing its member societies to "move" immediately into IMIA, giving IMIA credibility from the beginning.

IMIA was formally established by IFIP in 1979, with specific bylaws giving it a measure of autonomy. Roukens was elected President. 'In retrospect, it seems quite incredible that all of this was in fact realized in a period of little more than two years!' Speaking of key players in those early days, he remarked, 'Oh, there were so incredibly many. I could talk names for half an hour without interruption. Thinking back to those days and all those people gives a warm feeling, and of richness without end.'

According to Roukens, IMIA succeeded by giving its members a platform, an intellectual framework, for discussion. 'Its domain of discourse is scientific and essentially liberal.'"

- from "Bridging to New Worlds", by Marion J. Ball, 1995.