title: Medical informatics vocabulary.
abstract: In order that medical informaticians can create Open Systems for health care, they need to have a common language. Efforts in the 1980s at the National Library of Medicine to create a Medical Informatics Vocabulary (MIVoc) have been useful for document indexing purposes, but need to be continued and extended. The Committee of European Normalization Technical Committee 251 has created a project team for MIVoc, and that team has used both automatic and manual methods and referenced many sources in producing a vocabulary that has support from numerous experts in Europe. MIVoc has both a glossary and a tree structure. The glossary has about 250 terms with detailed definitions that include various explanations and pointers. One critical pointer is the semantic link to other terms in MIVoc from a which a tree-structure is inferred. The success of MIVoc clearly depends on its being used, which in the long run depends also on the vocabulary being maintained.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, England.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Rada
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Russell
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000592:standards*; D008491:Medical Informatics Applications; D009317:National Library of Medicine (U.S.); D017432:Unified Medical Language System / Q000592:standards*; D014481:United States