Terminology plays an important role in NCI's research, clinical, and information efforts. NCI is working with many partners to create and publish controlled terminology that can help develop and communicate information useful to scientists, clinicians, patients, and the public. Here are some key resources.

NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS)

EVS is a collaborative effort of the NCI Office of Communications and the NCI Center for Bioinformatics. The EVS provides a set of services and resources, including NCI Thesaurus and NCI Metathesaurus, that facilitate the standardization of terminology across the Institute and the larger biomedical community.

• NCI Thesaurus
  Published monthly by NCI, this reference terminology and biomedical ontology is used in a growing number of NCI and other systems. It covers vocabulary for clinical care, translational and basic research, and public information and administrative activities. The NCI Thesaurus provides definitions, synonyms, and other information on nearly 10,000 cancers and related diseases, 8,000 single agents and combination therapies, and a wide range of other topics related to cancer and biomedical research. It is maintained by a multidisciplinary team of editors, who add about 900 new entries each month.

• NCI Metathesaurus
  The NCI Metathesaurus is a comprehensive biomedical terminology database that contains 1,300,000 concepts mapped to 4,600,000 terms with 17,000,000 relationships. NCI Metathesaurus currently contains most public domain vocabularies from the National Library of Medicine's UMLS Metathesaurus, as well as a growing number of other cancer-related vocabularies.

• NCI Terminology Browser
  The Web browser used for NCI Thesaurus also provides access to the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA), the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT), the Gene Ontology (GO), and other terminologies used by NCI and its partners.

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