Abstract
The Unified Medical Language System's (UMLS's) Semantic Network (SN)---consisting of a network of semantic types---has a two-tree structure, where each semantic type has at most one parent semantic type. This arrangement is restrictive because some semantic types are, by their definition, specializations of several parents. As a proposed enhancement to the SN, its semantic types have previously been partitioned into groups, each of which contains semantic types of some specific area. However, some groups of this proposed partition contain forest (i.e., multiple-tree) structures or even isolated semantic types. Both situations imply a disconnected internal structure. Connectivity is actually one way to assess the proposed "semantic validity" principle for partitions. It is a desired, although not required, property. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for identifying "missing" IS-A links and adding them to the SN. This process transforms the SN into a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure, with semantic types permitted to have multiple parents. A result of our methodology is the transformation of the proposed SN partition into groups satisfying the connectivity property.
Full text
PDF
Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Campbell K. E., Oliver D. E., Shortliffe E. H. The Unified Medical Language System: toward a collaborative approach for solving terminologic problems. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1998 Jan-Feb;5(1):12–16. doi: 10.1136/jamia.1998.0050012. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Chen Zong, Perl Yehoshua, Halper Michael, Geller James, Gu Huanying. Partitioning the UMLS semantic network. IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed. 2002 Jun;6(2):102–108. doi: 10.1109/titb.2002.1006296. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Halper M. H., Chen Z., Geller J., Perl Y. A metaschema of the UMLS based on a partition of its semantic network. Proc AMIA Symp. 2001:234–238. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Humphreys B. L., Lindberg D. A., Schoolman H. M., Barnett G. O. The Unified Medical Language System: an informatics research collaboration. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1998 Jan-Feb;5(1):1–11. doi: 10.1136/jamia.1998.0050001. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Michael J., Mejino J. L., Jr, Rosse C. The role of definitions in biomedical concept representation. Proc AMIA Symp. 2001:463–467. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]