Tools for providing terminology services in health care computing

• Terminology and terminology services are increasingly important in building medical informatics applications like Computerbased Patient Record systems (CPR). Many classifications, nomenclatures and terminology systems have been constructed to this end i. a. ICD, MeSH and SNOMED. So far no single system has covered medicine in its entirety and particularly have they not been suitable for building computerbased applications and handling.The arrival of computer technology has led to new, more advanced terminology systems. The combination of these new terminology systems with knowledge representation vehicles such as Arden Syntax constitutes an important part of the process of developing efficient methods and systems for information handling including decision support and communication of meaning within health care.The main objective of the thesis is to present some computer based terminology tools that have been constructed to facilitate part of the work of building sound terminologies and application systems. The usefulness of such terminologies, terminology tools and the importance of being able to integrate the terminology have been reviewed and are discussed.Two terminology tools are presented that aims at facilitating the access to and the use of terminology and terminology services. One tool is built on the concept oriented Swedish national terminology data base model SpriTerm and provides browsing and editing facilities of concepts and concept spaces of vocabularies. Also the motivations behind the SpriTerm model are discussed.The other tool is a dedicated client (KOMANTIS) to the GALEN terminology server (TeS) developed as a deliverable within the European GALEN project. It will facilitate the integration of terminologies between an information system, and the knowledge base when building Decision Support Systems (DSS). The user can navigate through KOMANTIS and select the pertinent attributes for integrating, for example the DSS and the CPR.

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MEDICINE

MEDICIN

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