Modeling a description logic vocabulary for cancer research.

The National Cancer Institute has developed the NCI Thesaurus, a biomedical vocabulary for cancer research, covering terminology across a wide range of cancer research domains. A major design goal of the NCI Thesaurus is to facilitate translational research. We describe: the features of Ontylog, a description logic used to build NCI Thesaurus; our methodology for enhancing the terminology through collaboration between ontologists and domain experts, and for addressing certain real world challenges arising in modeling the Thesaurus; and finally, we describe the conversion of NCI Thesaurus from Ontylog into Web Ontology Language Lite.

Enhancing quality of retrieval through concept edit history.

The NCI Thesaurus is a public domain description logic-based terminology produced by the National Cancer Institute. The NCI Thesaurus is used to support storage and retrieval of scientific, clinical and research administration data. The content of the NCI Thesaurus evolves rapidly.

Role grouping as an extension to the description logic of Ontylog, motivated by concept modeling in SNOMED.

Several clinical terminologies now utilize description logic to model the logical definitions of concepts. Recent editions of the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) have been developed using the description logic Ontylog. A significant design criterion for SNOMED is to keep concept expressions simple enough to be broadly usable by clinicians, while maintaining faithful representation of concept meaning.