A medical terminology server

Abstract

GRAIL is a semantically constrained, generative compositional descriptive logic with subsumption and multiple inheritance designed to cope with the scale, complexity and variable granularity of medical concepts. It effectively represents a medical vocabulary for any application such as decision support systems, hospital record systems, clinical workstations and bibliographic systems. The EU-funded GALEN project aims to create a multilingual Terminology Server capable of being used as a resource by any medical application. The Terminology Server relates descriptive medical concepts represented in GRAIL to their natural language terms in a number of European languages and to corresponding (or best match) codes in conventional clinical coding schemes. In this paper we present GRAIL, the GALEN Terminology Server and make some remarks on the coupling of the classification-based clinical knowledge base (implemented in Smalltalk) with a relational database (Sybase).