Unified Medical Language System

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences (created 1986).^[1] It provides a mapping structure among these vocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various terminology systems; it may also be viewed as a comprehensive thesaurus and ontology of biomedical concepts. UMLS further provides facilities for natural language processing. It is intended to be used mainly by developers of systems in medical informatics.

UMLS consists of Knowledge Sources (databases) and a set of software tools.

The UMLS was designed and is maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, is updated quarterly and may be used for free. The project was initiated in 1986 by Donald A.B. Lindberg, M.D., then Director of the Library of Medicine, and directed by Betsy Humphreys.^[2]

^ Unified Medical Language System, 1996
^ Ellison D, Humphreys BL, Mitchell J (July 2010). "Presentation of the 2009 Morris F Collen Award to Betsy L Humphreys, with remarks from the recipient". Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 17 (4): 481–5. doi:10.1136/jamia.2010.005728. PMC 2995660. PMID 20595319.

[1] Unified Medical Language System, 1996

[2] Ellison D, Humphreys BL, Mitchell J (July 2010). "Presentation of the 2009 Morris F Collen Award to Betsy L Humphreys, with remarks from the recipient". Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 17 (4): 481–5. doi:10.1136/jamia.2010.005728. PMC 2995660. PMID 20595319.

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