Overview and utilization of the NCI Thesaurus

Abstract

The NCI Thesaurus is a reference terminology covering areas of basic and clinical science, built with the goal of facilitating translational research in cancer. It contains nearly 110 000 terms in approximately 36000 concepts, partitioned in 20 subdomains, which include diseases, drugs, anatomy, genes, gene products, techniques, and biological processes, among others, all with a cancer-centric focus in content, and originally designed to support coding activities across the National Cancer Institute. Each concept represents a unit of meaning and contains a number of annotations, such as synonyms and preferred name, as well as annotations such as textual definitions and optional references to external authorities. In addition, concepts are modelled with description logic (DL) and defined by their relationships to other concepts; there are currently approximately 90 types of named relations declared in the terminology. The NCI Thesaurus is produced by the Enterprise Vocabulary Services project, a collaborative effort between the NCI Center for Bioinformatics and the NCI Office of Communications, and is part of the caCORE infrastructure stack (http://ncicb.nci.nih.gov/NCICB/core). It can be accessed programmatically through the open caBIO API and browsed via the web (http://nciterms.nci.nih.gov). A history of editing changes is also accessible through the API. In addition, the Thesaurus is available for download in various file formats, including OWL, the web ontology language, to facilitate its utilization by others.

2014 ACC/AHA Key Data Elements and Definitions for Cardiovascular Endpoint Events in Clinical Trials

“…The terminology set will also be developed in an International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission 11179 standard metadata repository; this specification provides a standardized grammar and syntax for describing data elements and associated metadata, resulting in unambiguous representation and interpretation of data. 47,48 Specifically, the endpoint concepts will be represented in the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute Data Standards Registry and Repository to facilitate the use of the terminology set across the clinical care, research, and regulatory domains.…”

ACCF/AHA 2011 Key Data Elements and Definitions of a Base Cardiovascular Vocabulary for Electronic Health Records

“…[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] Source documents (noted in the Source column of each data standard 23,24 principally to facilitate adoption of these elements by the EHR vendor community. The ISO 11179 metadata repository standard provides a standard grammar and syntax for describing data elements and associated metadata that results in unambiguous representation and interpretation of data.…”

A Framework for Ontology Evolution in Collaborative Environments

“…The Protégé ontology-development environment 1 has become a widely used tool for developing ontologies, with more than 50,000 registered users. The Protégé group works closely with some of the tool's users and we have a continuous stream of requests from them on the features that they would like to have supported in terms of managing and developing ontologies collaboratively.…”

“…Another team with which we work closely is the team developing the NCI Thesaurus at the NCI Center for Bioinformatics [1]. NCI regularly publishes baseline versions of the NCI Thesaurus.…”