An ontological perspective on surgical procedures.

We studied terminological phrases on surgical procedures-from coding systems, controlled vocabularies, textbooks, and medical records-by an ontological point of view. A surgical procedure can be accurately described only by a set of sentences, in textbooks or surgical reports; a terminological phrase is just a short synthesis of that description. We outline three points of view actually used to construct a phrase, based on i) relevant phases and variants; ii) focus on structures, functions and pathologies; iii) evolution of information and decisions during the process of care. For each of them we discuss potential principles and mechanisms, with the aim of deriving guidelines to generate homogeneous systematic names, to organize regularities in classifications and nomenclatures, to normalize expressions in formal languages.