The Chinesization And Formalization Of Unified Medical Language System

Health is the most valuable wealth, people are concerned more about their ownhealth in recent years. With the development of information technology in the fieldof biomedical, Internet and the popularity of mobile communication devices allowusers to be more convenient and efficient to obtain massive medical and healthknowledge. In order to get the required information quickly and accurately fromthese massive healthcare knowledge, and solve the problem of different retrievallanguage and conceptual differences in the expression, U.S. National Library ofMedicine developed the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS).The general medical ontology or the UMLS in the field of biomedical andhealth not only can be used in language translation, natural language processing andlanguage standardization, but also achieve cross-database retrieval. UMLS combinesnumerous biomedical vocabularies and is widely used in terminology research,terminology mapping, intelligent information retrieval, natural language processingand other fields. In addition, UMLS also provides a number of supporting softwaretools for users to use the UMLS conveniently.This paper makes a study on the Chinesization and formalization of the UMLSbased on the overall organizational structure and the content of the UMLS. Theresearch of UMLS’s Chinesization has two parts: the Chinesization of concepts andthe Semantic relations between them. The main contents of the Chinesization ofconcepts is Metathesaurus’s Chinesization which has three parts:(1) Customized thesubset of Metathesaurus through qualitative and quantitative research;(2) In order tomap the Chinese medical concepts into the Metathesaurus concepts in the UMLS,Author built the English-Chinese medical controlled vocabularies of theMetathesaurus subset organized by using the unique identifier for concept in theMetathesaurus;(3) Constructed an interface to add Chinese concepts to the‘CNAME’ property of corresponding concepts in the Metathesaurus via the interface.The experimental results show that the method of UMLS’s shell is feasible. Thispaper also developed a series of interfaces that can be used to obtain the informationrelated to UMLS concepts and semantic relationships or other related informationbetween concepts.Semantic Network exists semantic information between the concepts. Theformal representation study of the Semantic Network can take advantage of theseknowledge. In this study, we used Web Ontology Language(OWL)to describe theSemantic Network, and then completed a formal representation of SemanticNetwork more conveniently by using the ontology building tool--Protégé and its associated plugins, and save it as OWL file for subsequent use.