Cited by 4,356Biomedical Text Mining and OntologiesSemantic Web and OntologiesLibrary Science and Information Systems

The unified medical language system (UMLS): integrating biomedical terminology

Open access
Bodenreider, O.·2004·Nucleic Acids Research

Abstract

The Unified Medical Language System (http://umlsks.nlm.nih.gov) is a repository of biomedical vocabularies developed by the US National Library of Medicine. The UMLS integrates over 2 million names for some 900,000 concepts from more than 60 families of biomedical vocabularies, as well as 12 million relations among these concepts. Vocabularies integrated in the UMLS Metathesaurus include the NCBI taxonomy, Gene Ontology, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), OMIM and the Digital Anatomist Symbolic Knowledge Base. UMLS concepts are not only inter-related, but may also be linked to external resources such as GenBank. In addition to data, the UMLS includes tools for customizing the Metathesaurus (MetamorphoSys), for generating lexical variants of concept names (lvg) and for extracting UMLS concepts from text (MetaMap). The UMLS knowledge sources are updated quarterly. All vocabularies are available at no fee for research purposes within an institution, but UMLS users are required to sign a license agreement. The UMLS knowledge sources are distributed on CD-ROM and by FTP.

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Crossref · 10.1093/nar/gkh061

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  • UMLS relations are sometimes overlapping in meaning (e.g., cause of and has causative agent both map to cause).

    “as UMLS relations are sometimes overlapping in meaning (e.g., cause of and has causative agent both map to cause).”

    From Crowdsourcing Ground Truth for Medical Relation Extraction (2018) · cites this paper as [6]

    The Terminology integration principles section describes several kinds of UMLS relationships, including ‘caused by,’ but does not say that relationship meanings overlap. Searches for ‘cause of,’ ‘has causative agent,’ and equivalent causal-relation mappings found no passage supporting the specific example. (LLM, conf=0.72)

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Authors
Bodenreider, O.
Affiliations
National Institutes of Health (US)
Corresponding author
Bodenreider, O.
Venue
Nucleic Acids Research
Published
2004-01-01
Volume
32
Issue
90001
Pages
267D-270
ISSN
  • 0305-1048 (ISSN-L)
  • 1362-4962
OpenAlex
W2159583324
Cited by
4,356
References
11
Citations by year
2026: 289 · 2025: 313 · 2024: 316 · 2023: 338 · 2022: 330 · 2021: 338 · 2020: 352 · 2019: 286 · 2018: 218 · 2017: 210 · 2016: 191 · 2015: 186 · 2014: 172 · 2013: 169 · 2012: 150
FWCI
9.37
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nucleic Acids Research (publishedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
National Institutes of Health (Z99 LM999999)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Semantic Web and Ontologies
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Library Science and Information Systems
Keywords
UMLS, UMLS Metathesaurus, biomedical terminology, vocabulary integration, NCBI taxonomy, Gene Ontology, Medical Subject Headings, OMIM, MetaMap, lexical variants, National Library of Medicine
MeSH terms
Animals, Humans, Licensure, Molecular Biology, National Library of Medicine (U.S.), Terminology as Topic, Software, Subject Headings, United States, Databases, Factual, Information Storage and Retrieval, Neurofibromatosis 2, Unified Medical Language System, Computational Biology, Internet, Databases, Genetic, Biomedical Research

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