Nelson S J, Tuttle M S, Cole W G, Sherertz D D, Sperzel W D, Erlbaum M S, Fuller L L, Olson N E
Department of Medicine, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta.
Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1991:209-13.
The Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus represents the results of a synthesis of existing biomedical naming systems (thesauri). The naming and other information about the meanings in the Metathesaurus can be used to find the preferred naming of that meaning in the source chosen by the user, by exploiting the property of semantic locality. The aspects of semantic locality in the Metathesaurus which can be thus exploited are the terms, the semantic types, the use of that term in a source context, and the co-occurrence of terms in MEDLINE. To find how a meaning is named in the source of choice, a user must exploit one of these aspects of semantic locality, entering a term somehow related to the term being sought, and navigating to the preferred term. While the first three of these aspects of semantic locality are normative, the last is empirical. Testing of the utility of the aspects of semantic locality in information retrieval would require a uniform interface with 1, no Metathesaurus, 2, the Metathesaurus without the aspects in question, and 3, the Metathesaurus including all the aspects. Other potential uses of empirically derived semantic locality include defining or suggesting potentially relevant concepts in a given situation.
统一医学语言系统叙词表体现了对现有生物医学命名系统（叙词表）进行综合的成果。叙词表中关于意义的命名及其他信息，可通过利用语义局部性的特性，用于在用户所选来源中查找该意义的首选命名。叙词表中可被利用的语义局部性方面包括术语、语义类型、该术语在来源语境中的用法以及在医学文献数据库（MEDLINE）中术语的共现情况。为了找出在所选来源中某个意义是如何命名的，用户必须利用语义局部性的这些方面之一，输入与所查找术语有某种关联的术语，然后找到首选术语。虽然语义局部性的前三个方面是规范性的，但最后一个是基于经验的。对语义局部性各方面在信息检索中的效用进行测试，需要一个统一的界面，分别涉及：1. 无叙词表；2. 不包含相关方面的叙词表；3. 包含所有方面的叙词表。基于经验得出的语义局部性的其他潜在用途包括在给定情况下定义或建议潜在相关的概念。
