Estimating Coordination in Medical Terminologies

Medical vocabulary is complex, expanding, and convoluted not least because of the large numbers of compound terms. Formalized medical terminologies such as SNOMEDCT and ICD-10 take one of two strategies when representing medical language: so-called pre-coordination where valid compound terms are included explicitly in the terminologies and so-called post-coordination where the terminology consists of a basis and a generative function from which the compound terms may be derived. However, these notions are not used with particular precision in the literature. In this paper, we provide a formalization of the notion of coordination, a technique for estimating the degree of coordination in a given system, and an examination, based on our technique, of the coordination level of a number of major existing terminologies.