Article 2

取自 NKOS

Build-up of Terminology Services for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) – part one: enterprise- and functional-level planning

László Balkányi, Gergely Héja

ECDC has initiated the build-up of a number of domain specific information systems in parallel. A common, shared terminology service, providing proper interface both for human and machine clients seemed to be the proper tool towards conceptual consistency (later interoperability) among the different systems, notably ensuring transparency and cross-search ability in the quickly accumulating communicable diseases related data, information and knowledge.

There will be internal and external machine clients of the terminology service, as the new European communicable disease surveillance system (TESSy), the epidemics intelligence supporting information systems (EPIS, TTT3), the ECDC WEB site, the Eurosurveillance journal, the Knowledge and Information service (KISatECDC4) etc. The human users will be internal and external experts, the public health and the communicable disease scientific community. This paper describes the enterprise and functional level planning of the terminology services, the necessary decisions ECDC were faced at and the planned process to build up services. As it was found that there will be a need for long term, strictly maintained, conceptually clear terminology handling to ensure consistency and expendability, the build-up of an ontology backbone became a core part of planning. The technical and engineering aspects are given in an adjoining paper.

主要方法：

We decided to take four steps: (a) an analytical step to fully understand and map sources of concepts, (b) extraction of concepts and related labels, (c) setting up a core terminology using the extracted material; (d) conceptual design and specification of terminology services on the enterprise, on the functional and on the logical levels.

看来还是通过过程控制人工地进行。

所采用的工具：

The following tools and standard methods were used: command line tools and disk cataloguing utilities for extraction of file/folder structures (as file/folder names will be used as metadata, as keywords to the documents stored), a Unicode text editor for building/editing xml files, a spreadsheet application for file statistics and term handling for human users, GATE [1] for term extraction from texts, Protégé [2] for ontology editing, SKOS [3] for building a common structure for differently structured external and internal value sets (like e.g. International Classification of Diseases [4]), DCMI [5] for structuring object metadata, OWL [6] for the ontology, a UML [7] tool to build use cases, class diagrams and component model of terminology services

看来确实挺复杂。