GALEN: a third generation terminology tool to support a multipurpose national coding system for surgical procedures

Generalised architecture for languages, encyclopaedias and nomenclatures in medicine (GALEN) has developed a new generation of terminology tools based on a language independent model describing the semantics and allowing comp uter processing and multiple reuses as well as natural language understandi ng systems applications to facilitate the sharing and maintaining of consis tent medical knowledge. During the European Union 4 Th. framework program p roject GALEN-IN-USE and later on within two contracts with the national hea lth authorities we applied the modelling and the tools to the development o f a new multipurpose coding system for surgical procedures named CCAM in a minority language country, France. On one hand, we contributed to a languag e independent knowledge repository and multilingual semantic dictionaries f or multicultural Europe. On the other hand, we support the traditional proc ess for creating a new coding system in medicine which is very much labour consuming by artificial intelligence tools using a medically oriented recur sive ontology and natural language processing. We used an integrated softwa re named CLAW (for classification workbench) to process French professional medical language rubrics produced by the national colleges of surgeons dom ain experts into intermediate dissections and to the Grail reference ontolo gy model representation. From this language independent concept model repre sentation, on one hand, we generate with the LNAT natural language generato r controlled French natural language to support the finalisation of the lin guistic labels (first generation) in relation with the meanings of the conc eptual system structure. On the other hand, the Claw classification manager proves to be very powerful to retrieve the initial domain experts rubrics list with different categories of concepts (second generation) within a sem antic structured representation (third generation) bridge to the electronic patient record detailed terminology. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd . All rights reserved.