UMLS (Unified Medical Language System)

[Roy Williams]

I saw a link to this in my email this morning, the Unified Medical
Language System (*), a compendium of different vocabularies about
medicine. It is sorted and classified in different ways, and has
licenced software to go with it.

"The Metathesaurus preserves the meanings, attributes, hierarchical
connections, and other relationships between terms present in its source
vocabularies, while adding certain basic information about each of its
concepts and establishing synonymy and new relationships between
concepts and terms from different source vocabularies.

METATHESAURUS SIZE: 113,699,627 BYTES.
CONCEPT UNIQUE IDENTIFIERS (CUIs): 729,248
SYNONYMS: 1,598,176

I wonder if this is something we could develop as a VO resource? There
are varous candidate vocabularies that we could uses as a basis listed
below(**).

It looks like NIH have spent a lot of resouces on UMLS, and I wonder
exactly how people use it, and more importantly for us, how such a thing
might help the VO community?

Roy Williams
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Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research
mail    roy at cacr.caltech.edu
voice   +1 626 395 3670


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(*) The UMLS system is explained here:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/META2.HTML

This is a list of all the vocaularies that UMLS has subsumed
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/METAA1.HTML

This is a list of "semantic types"
http://umlsinfo.nlm.nih.gov/styfile.html

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(**) Some Astronomy Vocabularies
UCD vocabulary
http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/doc/UCD.htx

Astronomy Thesaurus
http://msowww.anu.edu.au/library/thesaurus/

American Institute of Physics
http://www.aip.org/pacs/pacs01/pacs0190.htm