An ontological analysis of the UMLS Metathesaurus

Paper-based terminology systems cannot satisfy anymore the new desiderata of healthcare information systems: the demand for re-use and sharing of patient data, their transmission and the need of semantic-based criteria for purposive statistical aggregation. The unambiguous communication of complex and detailed medical concepts is now a crucial feature of medical information systems. Ontologies can support a more effective data and knowledge sharing in medicine. In this paper we briefly survey our ontological analysis and integration of various top-levels of terminologies and we report the main results of the ontological analysis of the UMLS Metathesaurus.