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Enhancing the Quality of Hierarchic Relations in the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus to Enable Faceted Query of
Licong Cui1, Rashmie Abeysinghe1,2, Fengbo Zheng1,2
1School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX.
Purpose:
To audit and improve the completeness of the hierarchic (or is-a) relations of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Thesaurus to support its role as a faceted system for querying cancer registry data.
Methods:
We performed quality auditing of the 19.01d version of the NCI Thesaurus. Our hybrid auditing method consisted of three main steps: computing nonlattice subgraphs, constructing lexical features for concepts in each subgraph, and performing subsumption reasoning with each subgraph to automatically suggest potentially missing is-a relations.
Results:
A total of 9,512 nonlattice subgraphs were obtained. Our method identified 925 potentially missing is-a relations in 441 nonlattice subgraphs; 72 of 176 reviewed samples were confirmed as valid missing is-a relations and have been incorporated in the newer versions of the NCI Thesaurus.
Conclusion:
Autosuggested changes resulting from our auditing method can improve the structural organization of the NCI Thesaurus in supporting its new role for faceted query.
