Summary
The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project is a research effort to develop knowledge-based tools and resources to compensate for differences in the way concepts are expressed in the field of biomedicine. Since 1990, a set of UMLS Knowledge Sources has been released annually to the research community. This paper gives an overview of the current knowledge sources and highlights the nature of the concepts and their interrelationships in the most recent release of the UMLS. The paper illustrates the complexity of the biomedical terminologies that have been represented in the UMLS as well as the methods that have been used to harness this complexity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
HUMPHREYS, B. L.; HOLE, W. T.; MCCRAY, A. T. and FITZMAURICE, J. M. (1996): Planned NLM/AHCPR Large-Scale Vocabulary Test: Using UMLS technology to determine how well controlled vocabularies cover terminology needed for health care and public health. Journal of the America Medical Informatics Association, 3(4):281–287.
KETCHELL D. S.; FREEDMAN M. M.; JORDAN, W. E., LIGHTFOOT E. M., HEYANO S. and LIBBEY, P. A. (1996): Willow: A uniform search interface. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 3(1):27–37.
LEHMAN, F. (ed.) (1992): Semantic Networks in Artificial Intelligence. Pergamon Press, Oxford.
LOWE H. J.; BUCHANAN B. G.; COOPER G. F. and VRIES J. K. (1995): Building a medical multimedia database system to integrate clinical information: an application of high-performance computing and communications technology. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, Jan, 83(1):57–64.
LINDENBERG D. A. B.; HUMPHREYS, B. L. and MCCRAY, A. T. (1993): The Unified Medical Language System. Methods of Information in Medicine, 32, No.4, 281–291.
MCCRAY, A. T. and RAZI, A. (1995): The UMLS Knowledge Source Server. In: R. A. GREENES, H. E. PETERSON, D. J. PROTTI (eds.), Proceedings of the Eighth World Congress on Medical Informatics: Medinfo’ 95, 144-147.
MCCRAY, A. T. and NELSON, S. J. (1995): The representation of meaning in the UMLS. Methods of Information in Medicine, 34, No. 1/2, 193–201.
MCCRAY, A. T.; SRINIVASAN, S. and BROWNE, A. C. (1994): Lexical methods for managing variation in biomedical terminologies. In: J. G. OZBOLT (ed.): Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, 235-239.
QUIRK, R.; GREENBAUM, S.; LEECH, G. and SVARTVIK, J (1985): A comprehensive grammar of the English Language. London: Longman Publishers.
RODGERS, R. P. C. (1995): Automated retrieval from multiple disparate information sources: The World Wide Web and the NLM’s Sourcerer project. JASIS, 46, No. 10, 755–764.
SOWA, J. F. (1984): Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
McCray, A.T. (1997). Conceptual Complexity in Biomedical Terminologies: The UMLS Approach. In: Klar, R., Opitz, O. (eds) Classification and Knowledge Organization. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-59051-1_50
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-59051-1_50
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-62981-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-59051-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive