Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS®)
Project Officer: Betsy Humphreys, M.L.S.
One of NLM's major research initiatives is the
Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Project.
The UMLS comprises four principal knowledge sources:
- UMLS Metathesaurus®
(An important application based on the Metathesaurus is the
Coach Expert Search Refinement System).
-
The 1994 edition maps over 190,000 concepts and over 370,000 terms
from 24 defined medical vocabularies into a common lexicon.
- UMLS Semantic Network
-
This assigns semantic types to the elements of the lexicon,
and defines which relationships between semantic types are meaningful.
- The SPECIALIST lexicon
-
This contains syntactic information for many Metathesaurus terms,
component words, and English words that do not appear in the Metathesaurus.
It serves as a source of information for the SPECIALIST
natural language processing system.
- Information Sources Map (ISM)
-
The ISM consists of a descriptive component
(a database of information sources, generally Internet-accessible)
and a procedural component,
a prototype for which is currently under development in collaboration with
the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval
(CNIDR).
A 4 CD-ROM set of the UMLS information sources is available
for investigatory purposes.
Due to the presence of proprietary information such as content from
Dorland's Medical Dictionary,
a license agreement must be signed.
- Direct enquiries to:
-
Betsy Humphreys
UMLS Project Officer
Bldg. 38, Room 2W06
8600 Rockville Pike
Bethesda MD 20894 USA
NLM HyperDOC / UMLS FactSheet / April 1994