audio clip available
Bill Hole joined the NLM to work on the Unified Medical Language System in 1989, and has been primarily responsible for producing the yearly editions of the Metathesaurus ever since. The Metathesaurus contains more than 150,000 medical concepts with over 275,000 names from 17 sources. The Metathesaurus is arranged by meaning and contains connections between concepts and additional information about the concepts. It is intended as a knowledge source for systems which help physicicans and biomedical researchers get the information they need as easily as possible.
Bill has a BA in Chemistry from Earlham College and a MD from the Ohio State University College of Medicine. He completed Pediatric Residency and was Chief Resident at Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center in San Francisco, did two Fellowships in Pediatrics at Stanford University, and was on the Pediatric faculty at Brown University for five years. He has had a long-term interest in electronics, digital systems, and medical informatics including creating the software (55,000 lines of Pascal and an SQL RDBMS) for a 17-center collaborative Child Psychiatry research network.
He has also done other interesting things, such as operating an AM/FM radio station in summers, teaching high school for four years, and spending two years as the Senior Medical Officer in Charge of Lassa General Hospital in the Nigerian bush (most of it as the only doctor!).