Abstract
Paper-based terminology systems cannot satisfy anymore the new desiderata of healthcare information systems: the demand for re-use and sharing of patient data, their transmission and the need of semantic-based criteria for purposive statistical aggregation. The unambiguous communication of complex and detailed medical concepts is now a crucial feature of medical information systems. Ontologies can support a more effective data and knowledge sharing in medicine. In this paper we survey the ontological analysis performed on the top-levels of some important medical terminology systems (an outcome of the ONIONS methodology) and we sketch out the ontological analysis performed on the UMLS Metathesaurus™. We show the convenience of an ontological approach in dealing with the different conceptualizations behind medical terminologies and the polysemy of terms. The multiple classification in UMLS is shown to be a phenomenon of polysemy and not one of multiple subsumption.
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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Pisanelli, D.M., Gangemi, A., Steve, G. (1999). A Medical Ontology Library That Integrates the UMLS Metathesaurus™. In: Horn, W., Shahar, Y., Lindberg, G., Andreassen, S., Wyatt, J. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. AIMDM 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1620. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48720-4_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48720-4_26
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