A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL WITH UMLS

A high level representation of data would clarify the complex collecti on of medical concepts, terms and relationships derived from standard classifications that the Unified Medical Language System contains. A c onceptual model is described which represents the data structure. A se cond objective of this conceptual model is to provide users with the c apability to build queries to information databases as easily as possi ble on the basis of this data structure. The methods used to build thi s model are semantic networks and conceptual graphs. The object-orient ed computational model which implements this conceptual model is detai led. It reuses part of the generic C++ classes of the National Institu tes of Health library. New classes are added to this library to implem ent the needed functionalities.