title: Does SNOMED CT post-coordination scale?
abstract: SNOMED CT is a compositional terminology. Construction of post-coordinated expressions allows users to specify new meaning by referencing existing SNOMED CT concepts. The use of post-coordinated expressions in information systems requires special software, a reasoner, to give the exact relations between post-coordinated expressions and existing SNOMED CT content. Thus, the performance characteristics of reasoners are important for implementation of post-coordination in information systems. This study aims to test how reasoners perform when a large number of post-coordinated expressions are added to SNOMED CT. The time needed to classify an ontology consisting of SNOMED CT plus an increasing number of post-coordinated expressions is measured. The best performing reasoner in this test classifies SNOMED CT plus 1 million post-coordinated expressions in 42 seconds. The time to classify grows a little less than quadratic as the size of the ontology increases. In conclusion, classification time is not a problem using current reasoners and current SNOMED CT releases even if a large number of post-coordinated expressions are added.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Karlsson
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden.
authors.forename: Mikael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nyström
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden.
authors.forename: Ronald
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cornet
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000145:classification* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000592:standards* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D012660:Semantics; D039061:Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine; D014175:Translating; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled