A Software Modeling Perspective of UMLS Semantic Network

Abstract

The UMLS is a standard medical vocabulary developed by aggregating standard terminologies and sources from diverse healthcare domains, which encapsulates a broad spectrum of medical knowledge. The two primary knowledge sources of the UMLS are semantic network (SN) and metathesaurus (META). In the present state, the impact of the semantic knowledge captured by UMLS-SN on healthcare application is minimal or has no impact, as UMLS confines the UMLS-SN knowledge. Further, healthcare application design and development is achieved primarily by using sound software modeling principles and established object-oriented (OO) frameworks and languages. The goal of this chapter is to translate UMLS-SN knowledge into an OO modeling framework to utilize SN's knowledge in designing healthcare application. The result is the design and development of UMLS-SN, a custom metamodel by leveraging UML profile and metamodel. This specialized metamodel allows developers to design healthcare applications that are coherent with object-oriented modeling and software engineering approaches.