This paper discusses the manner in which SNOMED CT (SCT) has confused the metonymic role of some class labels as holonyms and has inappropriately assigned property inheritance down a holonymic chain due to its transitiveness. The notion of emergent properties is introduced as the only form of property that can exist on a holonym and its use in a hypernymic inheritance hierarchy is discussed. Th...

We developed a method to evaluate the extent to which the International Classification of Function, Disability, and Health (ICF) and SNOMED CT cover concepts used in the disability listing criteria of the U.S. Social Security Administration's "Blue Book." First we decomposed the criteria into their constituent concepts and relationships. We defined different types of mappings and manually mappe...

As part of its investigations, the EU-funded ASSESS CT project developed an Economic Assessment Model for assessing SNOMED CT's and other terminologies' socio-economic impact in a systematic approach. Methodology and key elements of the model are presented: cost and benefit indicators for assessing deployment, and a cost-benefit analysis tool to collect, estimate, and evaluate data.

OBJECTIVE To quantify the presence of and evaluate an approach for detection of inconsistencies in the formal definitions of SNOMED CT (SCT) concepts utilizing a lexical method. MATERIAL AND METHOD Utilizing SCT's Procedure hierarchy, we algorithmically formulated similarity sets: groups of concepts with similar lexical structure of their fully specified name. We formulated five random sample...

Human studies are the most important source of evidence for advancing our understanding of health and disease. Yet there is no standard method for investigators to query for studies that are relevant to their scientific hypothesis. Querying data and meta-data across clinical trials and observational studies is difficult because of the lack of semantic and terminology standards for describing th...

SNOMED CT is a clinical terminology that describes the meaning of terms by logical axioms. This requires an ontological commitment, i.e. precise agreements about the ontological nature of the entities referred to. We provide evidence that SNOMED implicitly supports at least three different kinds of commitments, viz. (i) independently existing entities, (ii) representational artifacts, and (iii)...

In this study we develop some linguistic bases for mapping between terminologies and demonstrate their application on mapping ICPC-2 PLUS to SNOMED CT (SCT). The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) metathesaurus mapping, which utilises the links between ICPC-2 PLUS and SCT terms in the UMLS library mapped 46.5% of ICPC-2 PLUS terms to SCT. Lexical mapping explored the lexical similarities be...

SNOMED CT was chosen as reference terminology for standardisation of homecare nursing documentation to make reporting comparable across the 98 Danish municipalities. The method outlined in this paper for developing a Danish national homecare nursing SNOMED CT subsets is a pragmatic approach to build new SNOMED CT subsets drawing on existing and available SNOMED CT subsets. Combining this approa...

Introduction Quality assurance is a demanding task for large biomedical terminologies during the development and maintenance process. The Description Logic (DL) serves as the basis of terminology classification and consistency checking for quite a few large terminologies, such as SNOMED CT [1], Galen[2], and NCIT[3]. Without doubt, to some extend DL helps the quality assurance of the terminolog...

OBJECTIVE Large and complex terminologies, such as Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), are prone to errors and inconsistencies. Abstraction networks are compact summarizations of the content and structure of a terminology. Abstraction networks have been shown to support terminology quality assurance. In this paper, we introduce an abstraction network derivation met...