Unified Medical Language System

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences (created 1986). It provides a mapping structure among these vocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various terminology systems; it may also be viewed as a comprehensive thesaurus and ontology of biomedical concepts. UMLS further provides facilities for natural language processing. It is intended to be used mainly by developers of systems in medical informatics.

UMLS consists of Knowledge Sources (databases) and a set of software tools.

The UMLS was designed and is maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, is updated quarterly and may be used for free. The project was initiated in 1986 by Donald A.B. Lindberg, M.D., then Director of the Library of Medicine.

The number of biomedical resources available to researchers is enormous. Often this is a problem due to the large volume of documents retrieved when the medical literature is searched. The purpose of the UMLS is to enhance access to this literature by facilitating the development of computer systems that understand biomedical language. This is achieved by overcoming two significant barriers: "the variety of ways the same concepts are expressed in different machine-readable sources & by different people" and "the distribution of useful information among many disparate databases & systems".

Users of the system are required to sign a "UMLS agreement" and file brief annual usage reports. Academic users may use the UMLS free of charge for research purposes. Commercial or production use requires copyright licenses for some of the incorporated source vocabularies.

The Metathesaurus forms the base of the UMLS and comprises over 1 million biomedical concepts and 5 million concept names, all of which stem from the over 100 incorporated controlled vocabularies and classification systems. Some examples of the incorporated controlled vocabularies are ICD-10, MeSH, SNOMED CT, DSM-IV, LOINC, WHO Adverse Drug Reaction Terminology, UK Clinical Terms, RxNorm, Gene Ontology, and OMIM (see full list).

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