<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>At the US National Library of Medicine we have developed the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), whose goal it is to provide integrated access to a large
number of biomedical resources by unifying the vocabularies that are used to access
those resources. The UMLS currently interrelates some 60 controlled vocabularies in
the biomedical domain. The UMLS coverage is quite extensive, including not only
many concepts in clinical medicine, but also a large number of concepts applicable to
the broad domain of the life sciences. In order to provide an overarching conceptual
framework for all UMLS concepts, we developed an upper-level ontology, called the
UMLS semantic network. The semantic network, through its 134 semantic types,
provides a consistent categorization of all concepts represented in the UMLS. The 54
links between the semantic types provide the structure for the network and represent
important relationships in the biomedical domain. Because of the growing number of
information resources that contain genetic information, the UMLS coverage in this
area is being expanded. We recently integrated the taxonomy of organisms developed
by the NLM's National Center for Biotechnology Information, and we are currently
working together with the developers of the Gene Ontology to integrate this resource,
as well. As additional, standard, ontologies become publicly available, we expect to
integrate these into the UMLS construct.</p>
[]
Comp Funct Genomics. 2003 Feb; 4(1):80-84