<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>This paper reports a large-scale knowledge conversion and curation experiment. Biomedical domain knowledge from a semantically weak and shallow terminological
resource, the UMLS, is transformed into a rigorous description logics format. This
way, the broad coverage of the UMLS is combined with inference mechanisms for
consistency and cycle checking. They are the key to proper cleansing of the knowledge
directly imported from the UMLS, as well as subsequent updating, maintenance and
refinement of large knowledge repositories. The emerging biomedical knowledge base
currently comprises more than 240 000 conceptual entities and hence constitutes one
of the largest formal knowledge repositories ever built.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2003 Feb; 4(1):94-97