Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota 55905, USA.
J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2010 Nov-Dec;17(6):714-9. doi: 10.1136/jamia.2009.001149.
To facilitate the integration of terminologies into applications, various terminology services application programming interfaces (API) have been developed in the recent past. In this study, three publicly available terminology services API, RxNav, UMLSKS and LexBIG, are compared and functionally evaluated with respect to the retrieval of information from one biomedical terminology, RxNorm, to which all three services provide access. A list of queries is established covering a wide spectrum of terminology services functionalities such as finding RxNorm concepts by their name, or navigating different types of relationships. Test data were generated from the RxNorm dataset to evaluate the implementation of the functionalities in the three API. The results revealed issues with various aspects of the API implementation (eg, handling of obsolete terms by LexBIG) and documentation (eg, navigational paths used in RxNav) that were subsequently addressed by the development teams of the three API investigated. Knowledge about such discrepancies helps inform the choice of an API for a given use case.
为了便于将术语集整合到应用程序中，最近开发了各种术语服务应用程序编程接口 (API)。在这项研究中，比较并功能评估了三个公开可用的术语服务 API（RxNav、UMLSKS 和 LexBIG），它们都可以访问一个生物医学术语集 RxNorm，以从该术语集中检索信息。建立了一个查询列表，涵盖了广泛的术语服务功能，例如通过名称查找 RxNorm 概念，或导航不同类型的关系。测试数据是从 RxNorm 数据集生成的，用于评估三个 API 中功能的实现情况。结果揭示了 API 实现（例如，LexBIG 处理废弃术语）和文档（例如，RxNav 中使用的导航路径）的各个方面存在问题，随后三个被调查的 API 的开发团队对这些问题进行了处理。了解此类差异有助于为给定用例选择 API 提供信息。
