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The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project regularly
distributes a set of knowledge sources to the research community. These
knowledge sources include the Metathesaurus, Semantic Network and
SPECIALIST Lexicon.
Knowledge sources are made available over the Internet through the Knowledge Source Server (UMLSKS).
The UMLSKS is based on a three-tiered architecture. At the back end is an
Oracle database that contains the UMLS data, while the middle layer
consists of application logic to handle requests from Web browser
clients or command line clients. The application logic is written in
Java using RMI and XML within an RMI server architecture.
There are two
application programmer interfaces (APIs) available for users who write
their own applications. Java programs interface to the RMI server via
remote method using the UMLSKS RMI API. Non-Java programs can send an
XML formatted request for UMLS data to a specific socket port using the
socket server API. A lexically based, Java object model is included with
the API download and can be applied to the returned XML document to
create usable Java objects.
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