The Unified Medical Language System: An Informatics Research Collaboration

In 1986, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) assembled a large multidisciplinary, multisite team to work on the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), a collaborative research project aimed at reducing fundamental barriers to the application of computers to medicine. The UMLS illustrates the strengths and challenges of substantive collaboration among widely distributed research groups. Over the past decade, advances in computing and communications have minimized the technical difficulties associated with UMLS collaboration and also facilitated the development, dissemination, and use of the UMLS Knowledge Sources. Wider use of the World Wide Web has increased the visibility of the information access problems caused by the multiple vocabularies and many information sources that are the focus of UMLS work. The time is propitious for building on UMLS accomplishments and making more progress on the informatics research issues first highlighted by the UMLS project more than 10 years ago.