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Published on: February 23, 2019
Strength in numbers: exploring redundancy in hierarchical relations across biomedical terminologies
1U.S. National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland. National Institutes of Health & Human Services, USA. olivier@nlm.nih.gov
AMIA ... Annual Symposium Proceedings. AMIA Symposium
|January 20, 2004
Summary
Approximately 29% of biomedical terminology relations are redundant. While some terminologies overlap, redundancy shows a weak link to semantic consistency, impacting UMLS concept categorization.
Area of Science:
- Biomedical Informatics
- Computational Linguistics
- Knowledge Representation
Background:
- Hierarchical relations are fundamental in biomedical terminologies.
- The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) integrates diverse biomedical vocabularies.
- Understanding redundancy is crucial for knowledge consolidation.
Purpose of the Study:
- Quantify the proportion of redundant hierarchical relations in biomedical terminologies.
- Identify which terminologies exhibit significant overlap.
- Assess the relationship between relation redundancy and semantic consistency within the UMLS.
Main Methods:
- Counted hierarchical relations across UMLS integrated terminologies.
- Computed a redundancy index for each relation.
- Utilized cosine similarity for source comparison and UMLS Semantic Network for consistency evaluation.
Main Results:
- 29% of over 1.1 million hierarchical relations were found to be redundant.
- Consecutive versions of the same terminology showed the highest similarity.
- A weak correlation was observed between redundancy and semantic consistency.
Conclusions:
- Findings aid in selecting appropriate biomedical terminology sources.
- Informs strategies for identifying and utilizing valuable relations.
- Provides insights for auditing the categorization of UMLS concepts.
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