Automatic enrichment of the unified medical language system starting from the ADM knowledge base

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project aims to provide a repository of terms, concepts and relationships from several medical classifications. This work describes the possibility to enrich automatically with meaningful links the UMLS database by using description of diseases from another knowledge base, in our case ADM (Aide au Diagnostic Medical). In spite of the constraints and the difficulties to qualify the interconcept links, the results show that it is possible to find and create new links from a french knowledge database to the UMLS one. One of the interests of this work is that the automated learning of the connections could be used with others knowledge databases like expert system databases.