Representing Medical Knowledge in the Form of Structured Text: The Development of Current Disease Descriptions*.
Year: 1989
Type: article
Abstract: As part of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) initiative, some 900 diseases have been described using “structured text.” Structured text is words and short phrases entered under labelled contexts. Vocabulary is not controlled. The contexts comprise a template for the disease description. The structured text is both manipulable by machine and readable by humans. Use of the template was natural, and only a few problems arose in using the template. Instructions to disease description composers must be explicit in definitions of the contexts. Diseases to be described are chosen, after clustering related diseases, according to the distinctions that physicians practicing in the area under question believe are important. Limiting disease descriptions to primitive observations and to entities otherwise described within the corpus appears to be both feasible and desirable.
Source: PubMed Central
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1045108100