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A method is described for converting the diagnostic codes of a disease registry from the eighth to the ninth revision of the International Classification of Diseases. The files of the Health Surveillance Registry contain records of nearly 100 000 cases with ICDA-8 coded disabilities. These data are used to determine incidence, prevalence, and other statistics relating to morbidity in the Province of British Columbia. The steps are outlined to convert the disability codes to ICD-9, and include the development of conversion tables, techniques for both computer and manual conversion of the codes for each case, and a description of the resources needed to complete the conversion within a set time-limit. The conversion methodology outlined here can be adapted to future revisions of disease classifications.

In this paper we explore how we can use Specification and Description Language (SDL) to represent environmental models. Since the main concern in this kind of models is the representation of the geographical information data, we analyze how we can represent this information in the SDL diagrams. We base our approach using two examples, a representation of the Fibonacci function using a cellular automaton, and the representation of a wildfire model. To achieve this we propose the use of a language extension to Specification and Description Language. This allows the simplification of the representation of cellular automatons. Thanks this we can define the behavior of environmental models in a graphical way allowing its complete and unambiguous description. SDL is a modern object oriented formalism that allows the definition of distributed systems. It has focused on the modeling of reactive, state/event driven systems, and has been standardized by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in the Z.100.