Semantic-based information retrieval of biomedical data

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose to improve the effectiveness of biomedical information retrieval via a medical thesaurus. We analyzed the deficiencies of the existing medical thesauri and reconstructed a new thesaurus, called MEDTHES, which follows the ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2003 standard. MEDTHES also endows the users with fine-grained control of information retrieval by providing functions to calculate the semantic similarity between words. We demonstrate the usage of MEDTHES through an existing data search engine.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS

Keywords:
MeSH, semantic similarity, semantic-based information retrieval, thesaurus