UMLS Reference Manual

Full text of UMLS Reference Manual (2009) Bethesda, MD: National Library of Medicine (US), NCBI; 2009 is part of the NCBI Bookshelf.

The UMLS® Reference Manual describes the UMLS Knowledge Sources and related tools that are produced and distributed by the National Library of Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This documentation explains the following procedures and concepts:

• The purpose, content, and file structure of the three UMLS Knowledge Sources: the Metathesaurus®, the Semantic Network, and the SPECIALIST Lexicon
• The way to use associated UMLS programs:
  • MetamorphoSys, the installation program for the three UMLS Knowledge Sources. MetamorphoSys is also the customization program for the Metathesaurus, providing several output options, including Rich Release and Original Release Formats, and a choice of preferred character sets to produce custom subsets of the Metathesaurus.
  • Lexical Programs, which help to deal with inflectional variation (e.g., treat, treats, treating, treatment) in the English language, convert American English to British English and vice versa, and map text to concepts in the Metathesaurus
• The way to access the UMLS resources using the UMLS Knowledge Source Server, i.e., download, application programming interface (API), or Web browser
• The DVD-ROM distribution format for the UMLS Knowledge Sources and associated UMLS programs. The DVD is available upon request.