Health multi-terminology portal: a semantic added-value for patient safety

Since the mid-90s, several quality-controlled health gateways were developed. In France, CISMeF is the leading health gateway. It indexes Internet resources from the main institutions, using the MeSH thesaurus and the Dublin Core metadata element set. Since 2005, the CISMeF Information System (IS) includes 24 health terminologies, classifications and thesauri for indexing and information retrieval. This work aims at creating a Health Multi-Terminology Portal (HMTP) and connect it to the CISMeF Terminology Database mainly for searching concepts and terms among all the health controlled vocabularies available in French (or in English and translated in French) and browsing it dynamically. To integrate the terminologies in the CISMeF IS, three steps are necessary: (1) designing a meta-model into which each terminology can be integrated, (2) developing a process to include terminologies into the HMTP, (3) building and integrating existing and new inter-terminology mappings into the HMTP. A total of 24 terminologies are included in the HMTP, with 575,300 concepts, 852,000 synonyms, 222,800 definitions and 1,180,000 relations. Heightteen of these terminologies are not included yet in the UMLS among them, some from the World Health Organization. Since January 2010, HMTP is daily used by CISMeF librarians to index in multi-terminology mode. A health multiterminology portal is a valuable tool helping the indexing and the retrieval of resources from a quality-controlled patient safety gateway. It can also be very useful for teaching or performing audits in terminology management.