Special Issue on Auditing of Terminologies

This special issue is the first in any journal to deal exclusively with the auditing of medical terminologies and ontologies. In the early stages of many emerging technical fields, the emphasis is primarily on creating systems that work. The emphasis eventually shifts to guaranteeing a high level of quality. In fact, two sure signs that a technical field is maturing are extensive activities regarding standards—both national and international—and quality assurance initiatives. In the field of medical terminologies, we have seen a great deal of standards activity in recent years, such as the work of the ISO/ TC215 Working Group 3 (Health Informatics – Semantic Content) and the American National Standards Institute guidelines for designing controlled terminologies (ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005). There is also a heightened awareness of the need for terminology quality assurance, which has manifested itself in different ways. For example, at the 2007 AMIA Annual Symposium (Chicago), a session was devoted exclusively to terminology assessments (S10). One can also discern a constant stream of research papers in the medical informatics literature dealing with auditing. The breadth of this work, as measured by the number of different terminologies being considered, is growing. The reference list and Table 6 of the paper by Zhu et al. [1] in this special issue give evidence to these observations. Furthermore, many health care information systems rely on terminologies to provide semantically uniform access to knowledge expressed in different ways and following various paradigms. As a result of this reliance, an error in a terminology may propagate to errors in systems ranging from decision-support systems to pharmacy information systems that are monitoring, for example, drug allergies and drug-drug interactions. Hence, an error in a terminology may further propagate, resulting in an error in the treatment of patients. Realizing these facts, the guest editors came to the conclusion that the field of medical terminologies is maturing and that there is enough interest within the research community to warrant producing this unprecedented special issue on ‘‘Auditing of Terminologies.” The intention is to capture the current state of the art in the field of terminology auditing. In addition to announcing the Call for Papers for this special issue on the JBI Web-site and in other forums, the guest editors directly solicited prominent researchers in this area to submit papers. Fortunately, most of them agreed. The current issue features many authors with outstanding track records in the areas of medical terminologies and their quality assurance. To ensure high-quality published papers, many of the authors were asked to serve in the role of reviewer aswell. Some researchers who were too busy to prepare papers themselves graciously agreed