Integrating consumer-oriented Vocabularies with selected professional ones from the UMLS using Semantic Web Technologies

During the past few years, many consumer-oriented vocabularies have been developed to reflect the multitude of ways consumers express health topics, in order to help lay users access health information and manage their personal healthcare data. To address problems such as interoperability, ambiguity, and heterogeneity of medical information, the lay expressions from consumer vocabularies need to be mapped to the specialized vocabulary used by professionals (i.e., mapped to terms from existing medical vocabularies). This paper presents an approach for creating an Integration Framework for the General Practice domain. Our work leverages the Italian consumer-oriented medical vocabulary and its mapping to the ICPC2 terminology. We exploit mappings to four other professional vocabularies available through the UMLS Metathesaurus. Semantic Web technologies provide a platform for the representation of medical terms and their inter-relations. This framework could facilitate the exchange of information between consumers and healthcare professionals in health information systems.