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| Unified Medical Language System | |
Printer-friendly Version0.1 Purpose of this Documentation
The Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS) documentation describes the UMLS Knowledge Sources and
related tools that are produced and distributed by the National Library of Medicine, a part of the National
Institutes of Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This documentation explains the
following procedures and concepts:
- The purpose, content, and file structure of the three UMLS Knowledge Sources: the Metathesaurus®, the Semantic Network, and the SPECIALIST Lexicon
- The way to use associated UMLS programs:
- MetamorphoSys, the installation program for the three UMLS Knowledge Sources. MetamorphoSys is also the customization program for the Metathesaurus, providing several output options, including Rich Release and Original Release Formats, and a choice of preferred character sets to produce custom subsets of the Metathesaurus.
- Lexical Programs, which help to deal with inflectional variation (e.g., treat, treats, treating, treatment) in the English language, convert American English to British English and vice versa, and map text to concepts in the Metathesaurus
- The way to access the UMLS resources using the UMLS Knowledge Source Server, i.e., download, application programming interface (API), or Web browser
- The DVD-ROM distribution format for the UMLS Knowledge Sources and associated UMLS programs. The DVD is available upon request.
This documentation is updated for each release of the UMLS. It may be updated between releases if errors or omissions are found. The current document refers to the 2009AA version, released in April 2009. The next UMLS version will be 2009AB, scheduled for release in November 2009.
0.3 Audience
This documentation and the UMLS resources it describes are intended for system developers, informatics researchers,
librarians, and other information professionals. The documentation assumes that you are familiar with database
concepts and the Internet. If you intend to use the UMLS Knowledge Sources in software applications, it assumes
that you have experience with building and using complex databases. If you intend to use any of the UMLS programs,
it assumes basic familiarity with Java.
Neither the UMLS resources nor this documentation are intended for end users such as individual health professionals or members of the general public, unless they are also software developers.
0.4.0 Experienced UMLS Users
If you have done substantive work with preceding versions of the UMLS resources, go directly to Section 0.5, which describes any changes in the documentation and in the UMLS resources. Section 0.5 will direct you to the parts of the documentation that describe any changes to data files, content, or format introduced in this release.
0.4.1 Novice UMLS Users
If you are new to the UMLS, Section 0.5 may not be relevant, but you should read the rest of Section 0 and all of Section 1 before moving on to other parts of the documentation. The following brief overview describes what you will find in each section of the documentation.
Section 1. Introduction to the UMLS
This section explains the purpose of the UMLS, the conditions under which you may use the different UMLS components, and how these conditions relate to Open Access/Open Source principles. It also briefly describes each of the UMLS components and the relationships between them, suggests ways to build your understanding of UMLS features and capabilities, and provides a list of additional UMLS reference materials.
Section 2. Metathesaurus
This section describes the content and structure of the Metathesaurus, a large concept-oriented database that incorporates numerous biomedical and health-related vocabularies, classifications, and coding systems. The Metathesaurus categorizes these concepts by assigned basic Semantic Types and makes all information from these terminologies accessible in common, fully-specified file formats. The Metathesaurus includes coding systems and vocabularies designated as U.S. standards under the Administrative Simplification provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA) and as target U.S. government-wide standards by the Consolidated Health Informatics eGov initiative.
Section 3. Semantic Network
This section describes the content and structure of the Semantic Network, a small database that includes information about the set of basic Semantic Types, or categories, to which Metathesaurus concepts may be assigned. The Semantic Network defines the relationships that may hold between these Semantic Types and between broad groupings of Semantic Types, such as all types that denote disorders (Disease or Syndrome, Acquired Abnormality, Neoplastic Process, etc.).
Section 4. SPECIALIST Lexicon and Lexical Programs
This section describes the content and structure of the following programs:
- The SPECIALIST Lexicon, a database of syntactic, morphological and orthographic information for commonly occurring English language words and biomedical vocabulary. The SPECIALIST Lexicon is useful for natural language processing applications.
- The Lexical Programs, which detect and abstract away from the inflectional, case, and word order variations encountered in natural language. One of these programs, MetaMap Transfer (MMTx), is specifically designed to map arbitrary terms to concepts in the Metathesaurus, or, equivalently, to discover Metathesaurus concepts within free text.
Section 5. UMLS Knowledge Source Server
This section describes how to access the UMLS resources from the UMLS Knowledge Source Server via download, application programming interface, and interactive Web browser.
Section 6. MetamorphoSys
This section describes MetamorphoSys, the installation program for all the UMLS Knowledge Sources and the customization program for the Metathesaurus. You must use MetamorphoSys to install the Knowledge Sources. MetamorphoSys allows you to output data in either the 7-bit ASCII (the default) or Unicode UTF-8 character set. MetamorphoSys also provides two file format options (Rich Release Format or Original Release Format) for the Metathesaurus, and provides a number of other customization options.
Section 7. UMLS DVD
This section gives technical specifications for the UMLS DVD-ROM, an alternative method for distributing UMLS content. The DVD-ROM is available to UMLS licensees upon request.
Appendices
Appendix A includes the text of the License Agreement for Use of the UMLS Metathesaurus and its appendices.
Appendix B includes additional information about the Metathesaurus data elements and the current source vocabularies.
0.5 What's New for This Version of the UMLS
Release changes are also documented in the What's New section of the README text file included on the DVD.
0.5.0 Metathesaurus
Three new English sources were added:
- ICD-10 Procedure Coding System (ICD-10-PCS)
- International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF)
- International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health - Children and Youth Version (ICF-CY)
Two new translations were added:
- Korean Standard Classification of Disease Version 5 (KCD-5)
- Latvian translation of the Medical Subject Headings (MSHLAV)
31 English sources and 17 translation sources were updated. These include ICNP, MeSH, MedDRA, RxNorm, and SNOMED CT (English and Spanish). For a complete list of updated sources, see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/updated_sources.html. For more detailed information on changes in this version of the Metathesaurus, see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/updated_sources_expanded.html.
The Current Dental Terminology (CDT) has been removed from the Metathesaurus. CDT continues to be included in the HCPCS Version of Current Dental Terminology (HCDT).
ICD9CM_2007 to ICD10PCS_2008 mappings have been added. The mappings are bi-directional.
Data Changes
SNOMED CT
The Source Restriction Level (SRL) value in the 2009AA UMLS Metathesaurus has been changed from "4" to "9" for the following sources:
- SNOMED CT (SNOMEDCT)
- SNOMED CT Spanish (SCTSPA)
- SNOMED-2 (SNM)
- SNOMED International (SNMI)
There are no changes to the terms of the license, but only to the encoding of the SRL in the Metathesaurus. SRL data is encoded in Metathesaurus files: MRCONSO.RRF (MRSO in original release format) and MRSAB.
SAUI and SRUI
The values of SAUI and SRUI have been replaced with AUI and RUI. The values can be found in the STYPE column of Metathesaurus files: MRSAT.RRF and MRREL.RRF.
Medical Subject Headings, Swedish Edition
Definitions were dropped from this version.
0.5.1 MetamorphoSys
A full Metathesaurus subset now requires 17.7 GB of disk space.
Reported bugs may be viewed on the Release Notes Web page.
0.5.2 UMLS Learning Resources
Two new tabs have been added to the source release documentation Web pages: Semantic Type and Source Overlap. 2009AA source pages will be published following the release at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/sourcereleasedocs/index.html.
Users who are new to the UMLS are encouraged to review the New Users' Guide to the UMLS available at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/new_users.html. This guide includes online demonstrations, step-by-step instructions and a link to UMLS training materials.
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Last reviewed: 03 April 2009
Last updated: 03 April 2009
First published: 17 November 2008
Metadata| Permanence level: Permanent: Stable Content
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