Meaning of PDD term "UMLS - Unified Medical Language System"

UMLS

• The UMLS is the National Library of Medicine Unified Medical Language System. It defines common terms for disease conditions as well as other information.

• From the UMLS manual "The UMLS project is a long term NLM R&D effort designed to facilitate the retrival of information from multiple machine-readable biomedical information sources. The sources of interest include: descriptions of the biomedical literature, clinical records, factual databanks, knowledge-based systems, and directories of people and organizations. The variety of vocabularies and classifications used in different sources is a significant barrier to the use of machine-readible sources by health professions and biomedical researches and to the development of effective search interfaces that might assist these users."

• Reference for UMLS: Lindberg, D.A.B., Humphreys, B.L. and McCray, A.T. (1993). The Unified Medical Language System. 32, 281-291.

• Information on UMLS can be obtained from NLM by calling Dr. William Hole (301)-496-9300 or by e-mail (wth@nlm.nih.gov).