title: Semantic standards for the representation of medical records.
abstract: Physicians developed their sublanguage (a system to represent medical concepts and their relations) to store and transmit general medical knowledge and patient-related information. Adequate formalisms are needed to obtain a standard representation of semantics of medical expressions for computer use. Comparison of the semantic contents of two expressions is possible only if a unique canonical form is defined; the transmission of medical facts or patient-related information is really meaningful only by defining a set of primitives (semantic categories and links) and the domains of values (concepts). These primitives must be harmonized to yield a "common core subset" of semantic categories and links. This subset provides a common basis; a procedure to register extension sets of primitives must also be defined, to comply with specific representation needs of specialties and classes of application software.
authors.affiliation: Reference Center on Terminology and Coding for Health Informatics, National Research Council-Institute for Biomedical Technologies, Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rossi Mori
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Galeazzi
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gangemi
authors.forename: D M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Pisanelli
authors.forename: A M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Thornton
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D006801:Humans; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized / Q000592:standards*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D012015:Reference Standards; D012660:Semantics; D013358:Subject Headings