3. What does UMLS stand for?
Unified
Medical
Language
System
4. Introduction
The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is
a many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences
created 1986. It provides a mapping structure among these
vocabularies and allows one to translate among the
various terminology systems; it may also be viewed as a
comprehensive thesaurus and ontology of biomedical
concepts. UMLS further provides facilities for natural
language processing. It is intended to be used mainly by
developers of systems in medical informatics.
5. Definition
The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a
compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the
biomedical sciences.
7. UMLS Uses
Information retrieval
Thesaurus construction
Natural language processing
Automated indexing
Electronic patient records
8. UMLS Objectives
Designed for systems developers
Develop multi-purpose tools to understanding of
medical meaning across systems
Overcome barriers to effective retrieval of machine-
readable information
Overcome variety of ways the same concepts are
expressed in machine readable and human language
9. To design information retrieval or patient record systems
To facilitate the communication between different systems
To develop systems that parse the biomedical literature
12. UMLS Terminology Services
The purpose of the UTS is to make the UMLS data more
accessible to users and, in particular, to systems
developers.
Metathesaurus browser
Semantic Network browser
The UMLS Terminology Services is a computer
application that provides Internet access to the UMLS
Knowledge Sources.