TOWARD A MEDICAL-CONCEPT REPRESENTATION LANGUAGE

The Canon Group is an informal organization of medical informatics res earchers who are working on the problem of developing a ''deeper'' rep resentation formalism for use in exchanging data and developing applic ations. individuals in the group represent experts in such areas as kn owledge representation and computational Linguistics, as well as in a variety of medical subdisciplines. All share the view that current mec hanisms for the characterization of medical phenomena are either inade quate (limited or rigid) or idiosyncratic (useful for a specific appli cation but incapable of being generalized or extended). The Group prop oses to focus on the design of a general schema for medical-language r epresentation including the specification of the resources and associa ted procedures required to map language (including standard terminolog ies) into representations that make all implicit relations ''visible,' ' reveal ''hidden attributes,'' and generally resolve ambiguous or vag ue references. The Group is proceeding by examining large numbers of t exts (records) in medical sub-domains to identify candidate ''concepts '' and by attempting to develop general rules and representations for elements such as attributes and values so that ail concepts may be exp ressed uniformly.