The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a comprehensive and integrated thesaurus and lexical knowledge base developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the United States. It is designed to facilitate the understanding and interoperability of biomedical and health-related information.
The UMLS serves as a meta-thesaurus, connecting and mapping multiple terminologies, classifications, and controlled vocabularies used in various health and biomedical domains. It includes over 4 million concepts from more than 150 different sources, covering a wide range of areas such as diseases, drugs, procedures, anatomy, and more.
The UMLS provides a rich set of tools and resources for facilitating the retrieval, organization, and comprehension of health-related information. It offers various services, including terminology mapping, semantic network, and natural language processing capabilities. These tools benefit researchers, developers, and healthcare professionals in tasks such as information retrieval, data integration, coding, knowledge extraction, and clinical decision support.
The main purpose of the UMLS is to enable the sharing and harmonization of information across different health information systems and applications. It serves as a bridge, allowing different terminologies and coding systems to communicate and interoperate effectively, thus promoting standardized and consistent representation of medical knowledge. The UMLS plays a crucial role in enhancing biomedical research, clinical practice, and healthcare information management by providing a unified and reliable framework for semantic integration and knowledge discovery.
