Transferring knowledge from one system to another

Although knowledge is contained in many systems, moving it from one system to another is not an easy task because each system is tailored in its own unique way and because knowledge configurations are usually copyrighted. To populate our FRAMEMED knowledge base we turned to the NLM Metathesaurus as a readily-available open source of knowledge. We were disappointed by the greatly variable granularity of the concepts and the lack of definitions that could be borrowed. Some reference books in electronic form seem attractive but reformatting will require excessive human intervention and copyright negotiation.