Background#R##N#Terms representing chemical concepts found the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) are used to derive an expanded semantic network with mutually exclusive semantic types. The UMLS Semantic Network (SN) is composed of a collection of broad categories called semantic types (STs) that are assigned to concepts. Within the UMLS’s coverage of the chemical domain, we find a great deal of concepts being assigned more than one ST. This leads to the situation where the extent of a given ST may contain concepts elaborating variegated semantics.#R##N##R##N#A methodology for expanding the chemical subhierarchy of the SN into a finer-grained categorization of mutually exclusive types with semantically uniform extents is presented. We call this network a Chemical Specialty Semantic Network (CSSN). A CSSN is derived automatically from the existing chemical STs and their assignments. The methodology incorporates a threshold value governing the minimum size of a type’s extent needed for inclusion in the CSSN. Thus, different CSSNs can be created by choosing different threshold values based on varying requirements.
['C. Paul Morrey', 'Yehoshua Perl', 'Michael Halper', 'Ling Chen', 'Huanying Helen Gu']
A chemical specialty semantic network for the Unified Medical Language System