Rosse C
Structural Informatics Group, Department of Biological Structure and Division of Biomedical Informatics, Department of Medical Education, School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA.
Clin Anat. 2001;14(2):120-33. doi: 10.1002/1098-2353(200103)14:2<120::AID-CA1020>3.0.CO;2-V.
This report examines the semantic structure of Terminologia Anatomica, taking one page as an example. The focus of analysis is the meaning imparted to an anatomical term by virtue of its location within the structured list. Terminologia's structure, expressed through hierarchies of headings, varied typographical styles, indentations, and an alphanumeric code, implies specific relationships among the terms embedded in the list. Together, terms and relationships can potentially capture essential elements of anatomical knowledge. The analysis focuses on these knowledge elements and evaluates the consistency and logic in their representation. Most critical of these elements are class inclusion and part-whole relationships. Since these are implied, rather than explicitly modeled, by Terminologia, the use of the term list is limited to those who have some knowledge of anatomy; computer programs are excluded from navigating through the terminology. Assuring consistency in the explicit representation of anatomical relationships would facilitate adoption of Terminologia as the anatomical standard by the various controlled medical terminology (CMT) projects. These projects are motivated by the need to computerize the patient record, and their aim is to generate machine-understandable representations of biomedical concepts, including anatomy. Because of the lack of a consistent and explicit representation of anatomy, each of these CMTs has generated its own anatomy model. None of these models is compatible with any other, yet each is consistent with textbook descriptions of anatomy. The analysis of the semantic structure of Terminologia Anatomica leads to some suggestions for enhancing the term list in ways that would facilitate its adoption as the standard for anatomical knowledge representation in biomedical informatics.
本报告以一页内容为例，研究《解剖学名词》的语义结构。分析重点在于解剖学术语因其在结构化列表中的位置而赋予的含义。《解剖学名词》的结构通过标题层次、不同的排版样式、缩进以及字母数字编码来体现，这暗示了列表中各术语之间的特定关系。术语及其关系共同可能捕捉到解剖学知识的基本要素。分析聚焦于这些知识要素，并评估其表示的一致性和逻辑性。其中最关键的要素是类包含关系和部分 - 整体关系。由于这些关系在《解剖学名词》中是隐含的，而非明确建模的，所以该术语列表的使用仅限于那些具备一定解剖学知识的人；计算机程序无法通过该术语进行导航。确保解剖学关系的明确表示具有一致性，将有助于《解剖学名词》被各种受控医学术语（CMT）项目采纳为解剖学标准。这些项目的动机是实现患者记录的计算机化，其目标是生成包括解剖学在内的生物医学概念的机器可理解表示。由于缺乏对解剖学的一致且明确的表示，每个CMT都生成了自己的解剖学模型。这些模型彼此不兼容，但每个都与解剖学教科书描述一致。对《解剖学名词》语义结构的分析得出了一些建议，即以有助于其被采纳为生物医学信息学中解剖学知识表示标准的方式来增强术语列表。
