Building cross-thesauri with the support of UMLS.

The absence of a robust system of descriptors (cross-thesaurus) hampers the development of combinatorial terminological systems. We developed a tool (I-BROWSE) to produce a cross-thesaurus by analyzing terminological corpora. To facilitate the work of experts and to produce re-usable results, our application interacts via the Internet with the UMLS Knowledge Sources Server. We applied our tool on 2999 dissections on surgical procedures produced in the project GALEN-IN-USE, as a part of the internal Quality Assurance program. Support from UMLS seems mostly promising about descriptors on <anatomy>, <pathological structure>, <pathological process> and <physiological process>. Additional assistance can be given to domain experts on less frequent descriptors on pervasive modifiers. We plan to apply our tool also to production of terminological standards in CEN, as a part of a worldwide process of gradual convergence and transformation of coding systems into second-generation systems and terminological services.