UMLS Metathesaurus

References

(Wikipedia, 2020) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Medical_Language_System Retrieved:2020-8-9.
- The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences (created 1986). It provides a mapping structure among these vocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various terminology systems; it may also be viewed as a comprehensive thesaurus and ontology of biomedical concepts. UMLS further provides facilities for natural language processing. It is intended to be used mainly by developers of systems in medical informatics. UMLS consists of Knowledge Sources (databases) and a set of software tools. The UMLS was designed and is maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, is updated quarterly and may be used for free. The project was initiated in 1986 by Donald A.B. Lindberg, M.D., then Director of the Library of Medicine, and directed by Betsy Humphreys.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/umlsmeta.html
- QUOTE: The Metathesaurus is a very large, multi-purpose, and multi-lingual vocabulary database that contains information about biomedical and health related concepts, their various names, and the relationships among them. Designed for use by system developers, the Metathesaurus is built from the electronic versions of many different thesauri, classifications, code sets, and lists of controlled terms used in patient care, health services billing, public health statistics, indexing and cataloging biomedical literature, and/or basic, clinical, and health services research. These are referred to as the "source vocabularies" of the Metathesaurus. The term Metathesaurus draws on Webster's Dictionary third definition for the prefix "Meta," i.e., "more comprehensive, transcending." In a sense, the Metathesaurus transcends the specific thesauri, vocabularies, and classifications it encompasses.

(Schuyler et al., 1993) ⇒ Peri L. Schuyler, William T. Hole, Mark S. Tuttle, and David D. Sherertz. (1993). “The UMLS Metathesaurus: Representing Different Views of Biomedical Concepts.” In: Bull Med Libr Assoc, 81(2).
- QUOTE: The UMLS Metathesaurus is a compilation of names, relationships, and associated information from a variety of biomedical naming systems representing different views of biomedical practice or research. The Metathesaurus is organized by meaning, and the fundamental unit in the Metathesaurus is the concept. Differing names for a biomedical meaning are linked in a single Metathesaurus concept. Extensive additional information describing semantic characteristics, occurrence in machine-readable information sources, and how concepts co-occur in these sources is also provided, enabling a greater comprehension of the concept in its various contexts. The Metathesaurus is not a standardized vocabulary; it is a tool for maximizing the usefulness of existing vocabularies. It serves as a knowledge source for developers of biomedical information applications and as a powerful resource for biomedical information specialists.