SNOMED CT – advances in concept mapping, retrieval, and ontological foundations. Selected contributions to the Semantic Mining Conference on SNOMED CT (SMCS 2006)

Medical science and health care both possess a strong tradition of structuring their terminological knowledge through controlled vocabularies, such as nomenclatures, thesauri, or classification systems [1-6]. The availability of such resources mirrors the need for sharing a common understanding of the employed terms and the semantic relations holding between them. Community-wide efforts such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) [7], have reached a level of both coverage and depth today that is unmatched within many if not most other scientific disciplines.