UMLS for LCSH

Gerry Mckiernan (mailto:GMCKIERN@GWGATE.LIB.IASTATE.EDU)
Sat, 6 Jun 1998 15:55:37 -0500 

Date:         Sat, 6 Jun 1998 15:55:37 -0500
From: Gerry Mckiernan <mailto:GMCKIERN@GWGATE.LIB.IASTATE.EDU>
Subject:      UMLS for LCSH
To: mailto:WEBCAT-L@WUVMD.WUSTL.EDU


UMLS for LCSH 


  I am greatly interested in learning about any current or pending research that seeks to apply the Unified Medical Lang
age System [UMLS] model for the creation of knowledge-bases and metathesaurus for Medical Vocabularies to the Library of
Congress  Subject Headings, or other controlled vocabularies. The UMLS was initiated more than ten years by the National
Library of Medicine (NLM) to enhance access to biomedical literature. As part of this effort, a "Metathesaurus" was crea
ed to integrate several medical vocabularies.  


The "Metathesaurus" "is organized by concept or meaning. Alternate names for the same concept (synonyms, lexical variant
, and translations) are linked together. Each Metathesaurus concept has attributes that help to define its meaning, e.g.
 the semantic type(s) or categories to which it belongs, its position in the hierarchical contexts from various source v
cabularies, and, for many concepts, a definition. A number of relationships between different concepts are represented. 
ome of these relationships are derived from the source vocabularies; others are created during the construction of the M
tathesaurus. Most inter-concept relationships in the Metathesaurus link concepts that are similar along some dimension. 
he Metathesaurus also includes use information, including the names of selected databases in which the concept appears, 
nd, for MeSH® terms, information about the qualifiers that have been applied to the terms in MEDLINE®. Information on th
 co-occurrence of concepts in MEDLINE and in some other information sources is also included." 


  Additional information the "Metathesaurus" is available at   


http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/umlsmeta.html 


   Backgrond information about the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project as well as other part o fthe UMLS effo
t is accessible from: 


  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/umls.html 


   The free Internet Grateful Med [Yep, Grateful _Med_] [http://igm.nlm.nih.gov/] makes uses of the  Metathesaurus for t
e Medline dfatabase as does OMNI, the e-Lib Web clearinghouse of Medical Web resources [http://omni.library.nottingham.a
.uk/umls/]      In addition to learning about formal actual or  planned applications of the UMLS model to LCSH (or a seg
ent of LCSH), I would also appreciate hearing speculation about the possibilities of such an application to the LCSH dom
in. 


   As Always, Any and All citations, sources, contributions, critiques, questions, concerns, comments, or queries are Mo
t Welcome!  


Joy!  


Gerry McKiernan  Curator, CyberStacks(sm)  Iowa State University  Ames IA 50011  


mailto:gerrymck@iastate.edu http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/  


"The Best Way to Predict the Future is To Invent [or Co-Opt [:->]] It" [With Apologies Possibly to Peter Drucker