A system for browsing the SNOMED International vocabulary

We have developed a means for "browsing" an extremely large vocabulary of over 130,000 medical terms (SNOMED International, 3rd ed.). This vocabulary someday hopes to become a standard vocabulary and coding scheme for patient medical records. After obtaining the vocabulary in machine readable form (ASCII in standard data format--SDF) we wrote a meta program in Turbo Pascal which parsed and embedded control codes into an input file for importing the data into an "infobase" known as FolioVIEWS. Using this infobase, it became possible to rapidly and reliably navigate around the SNOMED vocabulary in a manner impossible with printed material. The FolioVIEWS search engine is robust and rapid and allows for easy access to the terms. The utility of the infobase in evaluating the SNOMED vocabulary has been quite good. The actual utility of SNOMED as a standard vocabulary remains to be evaluated.