Ian Elcoate BSc (Hons), PGCE, MSc has a first degree in Physics, has worked in research at ICI Advanced Materials and taught in further and higher education until taking a year out in 2003-4 to study full-time for an MSc in Information Technology. He has worked as an I.T. Consultant since obtaining his MSc, with Distinction, in 2004. He was also awarded the BCS (Teesside & District branch) prize for the best postgraduate student that year.
As well as developing websites, his successful projects include extending the functionality of his MSc project to enhance its use in the NHS and the installation of this software, alongside engineers from Anglia Healthcare Systems Ltd (AHSL), in its first commercial installation after being trialled for a year in a Primary Care practice in Stockton. This system, written in C#.Net, linked two seperate healthcare I.T. systems together to automatically provide the transfer of all patient and GP demographics alongside the on-line ordering of pathology tests. As such it utilised underlying data structures, carefully reformatted data to allow exchanges between systems and also had a version utilising SOAP via web services.
Alongside running the business, Ian has also carried out research at the University of Teesside. His project, extending database controls to provide location privacy, utilised standard database packages alongside, GPS, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), the .NET framework and UML modelling techniques to provide the ability to control access to location data based upon temporal and spatial factors. We are working on a commercial application that utilises this research. As well as developing novel database techniques this project has also created a new way of simplifying areas in maps (polygon generalisation) and developed a mathematical model for the measurement and study of access controls to spatiotemporal data. There are a number of papers published by Ian and his co-authors in this area.
