An Upper-Level Ontology for the Biomedical Domain

McCray, Alexa T.

An Upper-Level Ontology for the Biomedical Domain

2003

McCray, Alexa T.(National Library of Medicine, Rockville Pike)

At the US National Library of Medicine we have developed the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), whose goal it is to provide integrated access to a largenumber of biomedical resources by unifying the vocabularies that are used to accessthose resources. The UMLS currently interrelates some 60 controlled vocabularies inthe biomedical domain. The UMLS coverage is quite extensive, including not onlymany concepts in clinical medicine, but also a large number of concepts applicable tothe broad domain of the life sciences. In order to provide an overarching conceptualframework for all UMLS concepts, we developed an upper-level ontology, called theUMLS semantic network. The semantic network, through its 134 semantic types,provides a consistent categorization of all concepts represented in the UMLS. The 54links between the semantic types provide the structure for the network and representimportant relationships in the biomedical domain. Because of the growing number ofinformation resources that contain genetic information, the UMLS coverage in thisarea is being expanded. We recently integrated the taxonomy of organisms developedby the NLM's National Center for Biotechnology Information, and we are currentlyworking together with the developers of the Gene Ontology to integrate this resource,as well. As additional, standard, ontologies become publicly available, we expect tointegrate these into the UMLS construct.

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