Skip to main content

Towards Very Large Terminological Knowledge Bases: A Case Study from Medicine

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1822))

Abstract

We describe an ontology engineering methodology by which conceptual knowledge is extracted from an informal medical thesaurus (UMLS) and automatically converted into a formally sound description logics system. Our approach consists of four steps: concept definitions are automatically generated from the UMLS source, integrity checking of taxonomic and partonomic hierarchies is performed by the terminological classifier, cycles and inconsistencies are eliminated, and incremental refinement of the evolving knowledge base is performed by a domain expert. We report on knowledge engineering experiments with a terminological knowledge base composed of 164,000 concepts and 76,000 relations.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Alessandro Artale, Enrico Franconi, Nicola Guarino, and Luca Pazzi. Part-whole relations in object-centered systems: an overview. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 20(3):347–383, 1996.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. James J. Cimino. Auditing the Unified Medical Language System with semantic methods. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 5(1):41–45, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Roger Côté. SNOMED International. Northfield, IL: College of American Pathologists, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Udo Hahn, Stefan Schulz, and Martin Romacker. Partonomic reasoning as taxonomic reasoning in medicine. In AAAI’99/IAAI’99 — Proceedings of the 16th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence & 11th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, pages 271–276. Orlando, Florida, July 18–22, 1999. Menlo Park, CA; Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press & MIT Press, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Ira J. Haimowitz, Ramesh S. Patil, and Peter Szolovits. Representing medical knowledge in a terminological language is difficult. In R. A. Greenes, editor, SCAMC’88 — Proceedings of the 12th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, pages 101–105. New York, N.Y.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1988.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Ian Horrocks and Ulrike Sattler. A description logic with transitive and inverse roles and role hierarchies. Journal of Logic and Computation, 9(3):385–410, 1999.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  7. Eric Mays, Robert Weida, Robert Dionne, Meir Laker, Brian White, Chihong Liang, and Frank J. Oles. Scalable and expressive medical terminologies. In J. J. Cimino, editor, Proceedings of the 1996 AMIA Annual Fall Symposium (formerly SCAMC). Beyond the Superhighway — Exploiting the Internet with Medical Informatics, pages 259–263. Washington, D.C., October 26–30, 1996. Philadelphia, PA: Hanley & Belfus, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Alexa T. McCray and S. J. Nelson. The representation of meaning in the UMLS. Methods of Information in Medicine, 34(1/2):193–201, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Domenico M. Pisanelli, Aldo Gangemi, and Geri Steve. An ontological analysis of the UMLS metathesaurus. In C. G. Chute, editor, Proceedings of the 1998 AMIA Annual Fall Symposium. A Paradigm Shift in Health Care Information Systems — Clinical Infrastructures for the 21st Century, pages 810–814. Orlando, FL, November 7–11, 1998. Philadelphia, PA: Hanley & Belfus, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Alan L. Rector, Sean Bechhofer, Carole A. Goble, Ian Horrocks, W. Anthony Nowlan, and W. Danny Solomon. The Grail concept modelling language for medical terminology. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 9:139–171, 1997.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Manfred Schmidt-Schauß and Gerd Smolka. Attributive concept descriptions with complements. Artificial Intelligence, 48(1):1–26, 1991.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  12. James G. Schmolze and W. S. Marks. The NIKL experience. Computational Intelligence, 6:48–69, 1991.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Kent A. Spackman and Keith E. Campbell. Compositional concept representation using SNOMED: towards further convergence of clinical terminologies. In C. G. Chute, editor, Proceedings of the 1998 AMIA Annual Fall Symposium. A Paradigm Shift in Health Care Information Systems — Clinical Infrastructures for the 21st Century., pages 740–744. Orlando, FL, November 7–11, 1998. Philadelphia, PA: Hanley & Belfus, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  14. F. Volot, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Bruno Bachimont, M. Ben Said, Jacques Bouaud, Marius Fieschi, and Jean-François Boisvieux. Structuration and acquisition of medical knowledge: using UMLS in the Conceptual Graph formalism. In C. Safran, editor, SCAMC’93 — Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care. October 30–November 3, 1993, Washington, D.C., pages 710–714. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Hahn, U., Schulz, S. (2000). Towards Very Large Terminological Knowledge Bases: A Case Study from Medicine. In: Hamilton, H.J. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Canadian AI 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1822. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45486-1_15

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45486-1_15

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67557-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45486-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics