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LHNCBC: Medical Ontology Research
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Medical Ontology Research |
The increasing availability of online, biomedical
information has sparked the development of knowledge
processing applications. Knowledge processing applications
address concept-based indexing and retrieval, question
answering, text understanding, and data mining. Semantic
interoperability is not likely to be found among
existing terminologies.
The Medical Ontology Research program is working to
develop a sound medical ontology to enable the various
knowledge processing applications to communicate with
one another. Creating a usable ontology requires the
definition, organization, visualization, and utilization
of semantic spaces created form biomedical knowledge
processing applications:
- Definition- Semantic spaces can be
defined from the semantic information that
is provided by existing terminologies,
knowledge bases, expert systems, or
extracted from the medical literature.
- Organization - Semantic networks can
be used to organize the semantic spaces.
- Visualization - Once defined and
organized, semantic spaces can be visualized
and presented to users in order to provide
users with a representation of a subdomain.
This representation will help users navigate
to the information they seek. Issues such as
granularity, redundancy, and consistency between
sources must be addressed before designing
applications for the visualization and navigation
of semantic spaces.
- Utilization - By specifying relationships
of proximity between concepts, semantic spaces
provide the basic knowledge used in applications
such as concept-based indexing, concept-based
retrieval and terminology servers.
Using the
UMLS
as the primary knowledge source along with
SNOMED-RT,
GALEN,
MEDLINE
citations, medical encyclopedias, and medical corpora
the Medical Ontology project will verify the formal
properties of concepts and relationships for consistency
and accuracy and work towards defining a model for
proximity between medical concepts.
Defining medical ontology will assist other National Library
of Medicine projects provide a well organized and more
complete representation of their biomedical information.
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