UMLS (Unified Medical Language System)

[Alan Rector]

Roy

The UMLS is a major resource managed by the US National Library of
Medicine.  It provides a cross reference of most of the major medical
and many bio ontologies.  Lots of information available on the web.

It is probably more a resource to link to and develop from than develop.

It's free, but there is a fairly complex licensing agreement because
much of the material contained is subject to various copyright agreements.

What can be re-used depends on the category of IP agreement in the
license.

Regards

Alan


Roy Williams wrote:

> 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
> ---------
> Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research
> mail    roy at cacr.caltech.edu
> voice   +1 626 395 3670
>
> -----------------------------------------------
> (*) 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
>
> -------------------------
> (**) 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

--
Alan L Rector
Professor of Medical Informatics
Department of Computer Science
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, UK
TEL: +44-161-275-6188/6239/7183
FAX: +44-161-275-6204
email: rector at cs.man.ac.uk
web: www.cs.man.ac.uk/mig
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