Mapping data elements to terminological resources for integrating biomedical data sources.
BACKGROUND
Data integration is a crucial task in the biomedical domain and integrating data sources is one approach to integrating data. Data elements (DEs) in particular play an important role in data integration. We combine schema- and instance-based approaches to mapping DEs to terminological resources in order to facilitate data sources integration.


METHODS
We extracted DEs from eleven disparate biomedical sources. We compared these DEs to concepts and/or terms in biomedical controlled vocabularies and to reference DEs. We also exploited DE values to disambiguate underspecified DEs and to identify additional mappings.


RESULTS
82.5% of the 474 DEs studied are mapped to entries of a terminological resource and 74.7% of the whole set can be associated with reference DEs. Only 6.6% of the DEs had values that could be semantically typed.


CONCLUSIONS
Our study suggests that the integration of biomedical sources can be achieved automatically with limited precision and largely facilitated by mapping DEs to terminological resources.
Mougin
Fleur
F
EA 3888, IFR 140, Faculté de Médecine, Université de Rennes I, France. fleur.mougin@univ-rennes1.fr
Burgun
Anita
A
Bodenreider
Olivier
O
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D016208:Databases, Factual; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D012660:Semantics; D012984:Software; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled