Unified Medical Language system (redirected from UMLS Metathesaurus)

Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)

trademark name for a project of the national library of medicine aimed at building an intelligent automated system that understands biomedical terms and their interrelationships and uses this understanding to help users retrieve and organize information from machine readable sources. Its goal is to facilitate retrieval and integration from a variety of machine readable information sources, including descriptions of the biomedical literature, clinical records, factual databanks, and medical knowledge bases. The UMLS will compensate for the differences in the terminologies used in these disparate systems and for variations in the language employed by users themselves. The UMLS is neither an attempt to impose a single standard vocabulary for use in the creation, storage, and retrieval of all biomedical information nor a plan for developing either a standard patient record format or a single unified medical knowledge base to assist with diagnosis and treatment.