Toward a Bio-Medical Thesaurus: Building the Foundation of the UMLS
Year: 1988
Type: article
Abstract: The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is being designed to provide a uniform user interface to heterogeneous machine-readable bio-medical information resources, such as bibliographic databases, genetic databases, expert systems and patient records.(1) Such an interface will have to recognize different ways of saying the same thing, and provide links to ways of saying related things. One way to represent the necessary associations is via a domain thesaurus. As no such thesaurus exists, and because, once built, it will be both sizable and in need of continuous maintenance, its design should include a methodology for building and maintaining it. We propose a methodology, utilizing lexically expanded schema inversion, and a design, called T. Lex, which together form one approach to the problem of defining and building a bio-medical thesaurus. We argue that the semantic locality implicit in such a thesaurus will support model-based reasoning in bio-medicine.(2)
Source: PubMed Central
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1519810859