Unified Medical Language System
The Unified Medical Language System ( UMLS ) is a project that aims to align terminologies in biomedical resources such as online databases and medical dictionaries. The project was initiated in 1989 by the US National Library of Medicine .
This is done by bringing concepts and relations of different existing databases into relation with one another, i. H. Ontologies are established. The system is continuously being developed, and use is free after registration. The UMLS currently encompasses over 100 biomedical terms .
It comprises one million biomedical concepts with around five million concept names. Examples from the 100 controlled vocabularies and classifications are ICD-10 , SNOMED , LOINC or MeSH . The system includes the three areas Metathesaurus, Semantic Network and SPECIALIST lexicon.