A Multilingual Browser Platform for Medical Subject Headings

Abstract

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) controls and publishes the thesaurus Medical Subject Headings which is used for indexing PubMed. Besides an XML export, the NLM offers a web based MeSH browser. The platform contains English terms. The German Institute for Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI) partially translated and published these terms. Recently, the German National Library of Medicine (ZB-MED) overtook the translation of MeSH. However, there is no dedicated platform which focuses on MeSH and covers multiple languages. Here, we address this gap, by offering a modern multilingual searchable MeSH browser. A modular platform using open source technology is presented. The frontend enables the user to search and browse terms and switch between different languages. The current version of the presented MeSH browser contains English and German MeSH terms and can be accessed at https://mesh-browser.de.