A Role for Controlled Vocabularies in Developing Structures for Sharing Medical Knowledge

Controlled Medical Vocabularies (CMVs) have been studied identify and characterize organized sets of well-specified semantic relationships in the biomedical domain. Results of research on both hierarchical and non-hierarchical associative relationships in existing CMVs are being used to enrich ontological content through the discovery of subclasses, attributes, and relationships, and to enhance structure by facilitating the organization of domain knowledge and exploiting relational patterns in their hierarchies and other forms.