UMLS for LCSH

[Gerry Mckiernan]

UMLS for LCSH 

  I am greatly interested in learning about any current or pending research that seeks to apply the Unified Medical Language System [UMLS] model for the creation of knowledge-bases and metathesaurus for Medical Vocabularies to the Library of Congress  Subject Headings, or other controlled vocabularies. The UMLS was initiated more than ten years by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to enhance access to biomedical literature. As part of this effort, a "Metathesaurus" was created to integrate several medical vocabularies.  

The "Metathesaurus" "is organized by concept or meaning. Alternate names for the same concept (synonyms, lexical variants, and translations) are linked together. Each Metathesaurus concept has attributes that help to define its meaning, e.g., the semantic type(s) or categories to which it belongs, its position in the hierarchical contexts from various source vocabularies, and, for many concepts, a definition. A number of relationships between different concepts are represented. Some of these relationships are derived from the source vocabularies; others are created during the construction of the Metathesaurus. Most inter-concept relationships in the Metathesaurus link concepts that are similar along some dimension. The Metathesaurus also includes use information, including the names of selected databases in which the concept appears, and, for MeSH® terms, information about the qualifiers that have been applied to the terms in MEDLINE®. Information on the co-occurrence of concepts in MEDLINE and in some other information sources is also included." 

  Additional information the "Metathesaurus" is available at   

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/umlsmeta.html 

   Backgrond information about the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project as well as other part o fthe UMLS effort is accessible from: 

  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/umls.html 

   The free Internet Grateful Med [Yep, Grateful _Med_] [http://igm.nlm.nih.gov/] makes uses of the  Metathesaurus for the Medline dfatabase as does OMNI, the e-Lib Web clearinghouse of Medical Web resources [http://omni.library.nottingham.ac.uk/umls/]      In addition to learning about formal actual or  planned applications of the UMLS model to LCSH (or a segment of LCSH), I would also appreciate hearing speculation about the possibilities of such an application to the LCSH domain. 

   As Always, Any and All citations, sources, contributions, critiques, questions, concerns, comments, or queries are Most Welcome!  

Joy!  

Gerry McKiernan  Curator, CyberStacks(sm)  Iowa State University  Ames IA 50011  

gerrymck at iastate.edu http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/  

"The Best Way to Predict the Future is To Invent [or Co-Opt [:->]] It" [With Apologies Possibly to Peter Drucker