Adaptation of Meta-1 for SAPHIRE, A General Purpose Information Retrieval System

The Unified Medical Language Systems Project (UMLS) of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has produced Meta-1, a metathesaurus featuring over 40,000 concepts and their synonyms from several commonly-used medical vocabularies. We have adapted Meta-1 for use in SAPHIRE, an information retrieval system featuring automated indexing and probabilistic retrieval. We have also built DESYGNS, a semantic network system designed to contain Meta-1 concepts along with their semantic relationships. Future plans include improved concept matching, improved indexing capability, and the use of semantic relationships.