Abstract not found

The European GALEN project is developing terminology services based on a large, re-usable medical ontology. The ontology is being built using GRAIL, a description logic with transitivity and general concept inclusions.

A common language, or terminology, for representing what clinicians have said and done is an important requirement for individual clinical systems, and it is a prerequisite for integrating disparate applications in a distributed telematic healthcare environment. Formal representations based on description logics or closely related formalisms are increasingly used for representing medical terminologies. GALEN's experience in using one such formalism raises two major issues: . How to make ontologies based on description logics easy to use and understand for both clinicians and applications developers; . What features are required of the ontology and description logic if they are to achieve their aims. Based on our experience we put forward four contentions: two relating to each of these two issues: . That natural language generation is essential to make a description logic based ontology accessible to users; . That the description logic based ontology should be treated as an `assembl...

this paper, we examine some methodological and theoretical principles to enforce this conformity. These principles result from our experience in Menelas, a medical language understanding project.

this paper is that, therefore, clinical terminologies are now software and that this fact has profound implications for how they are designed, compiled and maintained

this paper, we report our experience in applying provisional semantic definitions to surgical procedures in the Read Thesaurus, set in the context of published work on concept representation in the domain.