COVID term: a bilingual terminology for COVID-19
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Published on: November 10, 2023
Hetong Ma1, Liu Shen1, Haixia Sun1
1Institute of Medical Information/Library, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences/Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China.
Insights
A new bilingual COVID-19 terminology, COVID Term, has been developed to aid global knowledge sharing. This resource facilitates information exchange for health professionals studying coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
Area of Science:
- Medical Informatics
- Linguistics
- Public Health
Background:
- Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), caused by SARS-CoV-2, is a highly contagious global pandemic.
- Extensive research is underway to understand COVID-19's mechanisms, transmission, and clinical features.
- A standardized cross-language terminology is crucial for effective knowledge sharing and scientific dissemination.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a bilingual (Chinese-English) terminology for COVID-19, named COVID Term.
- To facilitate improved knowledge sharing and scientific discovery dissemination related to COVID-19.
- To support health providers and medical professionals in retrieving and exchanging multilingual information.
Main Methods:
- Developed COVID Term through classification schema design and concept representation modeling.
- Extracted terms from selected sources and constructed a hierarchical structure.
- Implemented quality control measures and provided open access via a web service.
Main Results:
- COVID Term includes 10 categories covering disease, anatomy, clinical manifestations, and more.
- The terminology encompasses 464 concepts, with 724 Chinese terms and 887 English terms.
- All terms are openly available online at http://covidterm.imicams.ac.cn.
Conclusions:
- COVID Term provides an updated bilingual resource for the global COVID-19 epidemic.
- The terminology supports multilingual information retrieval and knowledge exchange for medical professionals.
- Machine-readable formats (XML, JSON) enhance applications in information retrieval and machine translation.
Background:
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a pneumonia caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has shown its destructiveness with more than one million confirmed cases and dozens of thousands of death, which is highly contagious and still spreading globally. World-wide studies have been conducted aiming to understand the COVID-19 mechanism, transmission, clinical features, etc. A cross-language terminology of COVID-19 is essential for improving knowledge sharing and scientific discovery dissemination.
Methods:
We developed a bilingual terminology of COVID-19 named COVID Term with mapping Chinese and English terms. The terminology was constructed as follows: (1) Classification schema design; (2) Concept representation model building; (3) Term source selection and term extraction; (4) Hierarchical structure construction; (5) Quality control (6) Web service. We built open access for the terminology, providing search, browse, and download services.
Results:
The proposed COVID Term include 10 categories: disease, anatomic site, clinical manifestation, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, living organism, qualifiers, psychological assistance, medical equipment, instruments and materials, epidemic prevention and control, diagnosis and treatment technique respectively. In total, COVID Terms covered 464 concepts with 724 Chinese terms and 887 English terms. All terms are openly available online (COVID Term URL: http://covidterm.imicams.ac.cn ).
Conclusions:
COVID Term is a bilingual terminology focused on COVID-19, the epidemic pneumonia with a high risk of infection around the world. It will provide updated bilingual terms of the disease to help health providers and medical professionals retrieve and exchange information and knowledge in multiple languages. COVID Term was released in machine-readable formats (e.g., XML and JSON), which would contribute to the information retrieval, machine translation and advanced intelligent techniques application.
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