Practical Considerations in Interoperability: The Unified Medical Language System

Authors

Stuart Nelson

Publication Date

4-6-2004

Description

The Unified Medical Language System attempts to represent major controlled vocabularies in medicine in the same database, facilitating interoperation by meaning. The organizing principle of the UMLS Metathesaurus, semantic locality, can be thought of as analogous to orthography as an organizing principle of a dictionary. Achieving interoperation through semantic locality alone may not be sufficient in some cases, leading to questions of how to represent mappings. Implicit in many of the vocabularies is an information model; that model affects the vocabulary in subtle ways.

Document Type

Presentation

Language

English

Keywords

unified medical language system, informatics, healthcare, standardized terminology

Comments

Slides from a presentation given at the UNM Health Sciences Center

Sponsorship

Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center

Recommended Citation

Nelson, Stuart. "Practical Considerations in Interoperability: The Unified Medical Language System." (2004). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hslic-historical-administrative/43