Unified Medical Language System
In the last years there has been a huge effort made by the computer scientists toward the transition from machine representable contents to machine understandable concepts. The medical field is probably among the areas in which this transition had the most interesting results (and still has its most promising horizons). The UMLS is a first step in this direction and has been developed in order to facilitate the development of computer systems that behave as if they “understand” the meaning of the language of biomedicine and health. You can find webcasts of this resource supported by NIH at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/rss/umlswebcastsched.rss and you can sign-up for the upcoming events at http://wwwcf.nlm.nih.gov/umlswebcasts/signup.cfm.
Should we start to think at virtual physicians for our sons?
