Clinical Content Classification

In healthcare and medical sectors, clinical content content classification is typically used against a number of well established taxonomy/ontologies.

The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) presides over Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) which is a super set of:

• MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) thesaurus , a controlled vocabulary used for indexing, cataloging, and searching for biomedical and health-related information and documents and,
• SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine--Clinical Terms), a comprehensive clinical terminology, originally created by the College of American Pathologists (CAP) and, as of April 2007, owned, maintained, and distributed by the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO).

Clinical Content Classification in the NHS

Smartlogic and Capita have recently developed the NHS UK Ontology to drive search and fiindability on the NHS Choices website.  This ontology differs from clinical models in that its primary indexing strategy is to use “layman” terms.