Birsen Ozdemir

Unified Medical Language System Semantic Network (UMLS SN) is an upper-level abstraction of biomedical domain terminologies, which play a critical role in biology and medicine information systems. UMLS Semantic Network includes valuable data for modeling contents of the biomedical domain. However, the use of the Semantic Network is limited as it has a complex structure. Therefore, representing the SN in Web Ontology Language (OWL), which has semantically reusable and sharable format developed for use in the Semantic Web, allows applications to use the Semantic Network for supporting knowledge-intensive biomedical actions. This paper includes a discussion on alternative representations of UMLS SN elements in OWL.

The Unified Medical Language System Semantic Network (UMLS SN) being an upper-level abstraction of the biomedical domain has a complex structure due to many relationships, making it difficult for human orientation. Therefore, while the SN is a valuable source for modeling contents of the biomedical domain its usage is limited. NetON was designed and built for the automatic transformation of UMLS SN to OWL sublanguages to support semantic operations between biomedical systems. NetON uses advances in the Semantic Web, a candidate technology for sustaining knowledge intensive tasks. Ontology Web Language (OWL) sublanguage rules are used to represent information in UMLS SN. The major contribution of NetON is the opportunity of automatic transformation of UMLS SN to OWL sublanguages named as OWL Basic Species. The aim of NetON is maximum possible information transformation from UMLS SN. The only information that is not able to be transformed to any OWL Basic Species due to the lack of ap...

Page 1. E. García-Barriocanal et al. (Eds.): MTSR 2011, CCIS 240, pp. 163–169, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 The Need of a Semantic Layer between UMLS and Biomedical Information Systems Birsen G. Özdemir1 and Nazife Baykal2 ...