A TERMINOLOGY SERVER FOR MEDICAL LANGUAGE AND MEDICAL INFORMATION-SYSTEMS

GALEN is developing a Terminology Server to support the development an d integration of clinical systems through a range of key terminologica l services, built around a language-independent, re-usable, shared sys tem of concepts - the CORE model, The focus is on supporting applicati ons for medical records, clinical user interfaces and clinical informa tion systems, but also includes systems for natural language understan ding, clinical decision support, management of coding and classificati on schemes, and bibliographic retrieval, The Terminology Server integr ates three modules: the Concept Module which implements the GRAIL form alism and manages the internal representation of concept entities, the Multilingual Module which manages the mapping of concept entities to natural language, and the Code Conversion Module which manages the map ping of concept entities to and from existing coding and classificatio n schemes. The Terminology Server also provides external referencing t o concept entities, coercion between data types, and makes its service s available through a uniform applications programming interface. Take n together these services represent a new approach to the development of clinical systems and the sharing of medical knowledge.