A b s t r a c t , the National Library of Medicine (NLM) assembled a large multidisciplinary, multisite team to work on the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), a collaborative research project aimed at reducing fundamental barriers to the application of computers to medicine. Beyond its tangible products, the UMLS Knowledge Sources, and its influence on the field of informatics, the UMLS project is an interesting case study in collaborative research and development. It illustrates the strengths and challenges of substantive collaboration among widely distributed research groups. Over the past decade, advances in computing and communications have minimized the technical difficulties associated with UMLS collaboration and also facilitated the development, dissemination, and use of the UMLS Knowledge Sources. The spread of the World Wide Web has increased the visibility of the information access problems caused by multiple vocabularies and many information sources which are the focus of UMLS work. The time is propitious for building on UMLS accomplishments and making more progress on the informatics research issues first highlighted by the UMLS project more than 10 years ago.Ⅲ JAMIA. 1998;5:1 -11.Over the past 10 years the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)* 1 has captured the time, talents, and attention of many informatics investigators from a broad range of disciplines. The project is focused on overcoming two important barriers to the development of information systems that can help health professionals make better decisions. These barriers are the disparity in the terminologies used in different in- formation sources and by different users, and the sheer number and distribution of machine-readable information sources that might be relevant to any user inquiry. The UMLS supports the development of userfriendly systems that can effectively retrieve and integrate relevant information from disparate machinereadable sources. To accomplish this objective, the UMLS project has produced and widely disseminated four multipurpose knowledge sources designed for system developers: the Metathesaurus, the Semantic Network, the Information Sources Map, and the SPE-CIALIST Lexicon and associated lexical programs.
GLIF was sufficient to model the guidelines for the four conditions that were examined. GLIF needs improvement in standard representation of medical concepts, criterion logic, temporal information, and uncertainty.
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