The Terminology Server project seeks to bridge the gap between the vocabularies of users and the vocabularies of clinical and information retrieval systems. Many health care consumers, for example, do not know the technical vocabulary used in medicine. The terminology server developed by Lister Hill Center research converts users' non-technical terms into appropriate biomedical terminology that is recognized by an application. The terminology server enhances user-to-system communication by providing synonyms, lexical variation, and the knowledge associated with terms.

Ongoing research includes:

• The development of update models to incorporate new data sets into existing terminology data
• Studying new methods to support improved information retrieval through terminology servers
• Reviewing methods to provide developers with options for selectively filtering the UMLS Metathesaurus
• The development of stand-alone terminology server modules that may be incorporated into any medically-oriented application