A compositional approach to nursing terminology.

The development of standardised vocabularies within nursing has been an important research activity for a number of years. Current representations generally take the form of taxonomic vocabularies. These are seen as important as they provide a structure for retrieving and analysing data from automated systems. However, there is increasing evidence to show that traditional taxonomic vocabularies are unsuitable for capturing detailed clinical data. This paper describes how GRAIL (GALEN Representation and Integration Language) is being used within the TELENURSE project to develop a representation of nursing terminology which is sufficiently expressive for documenting detailed clinical data while retaining the benefits of traditional taxonomic vocabularies.