Current Projects

• The Semantic Vocabulary Interoperation Project
  We are investigating approaches to provide equivalent or semantically closest translations of a concept in a source biomedical vocabulary (e.g., MeSH) to a concept or concept expression in a target biomedical vocabulary (e.g., SNOMED). These approaches will exploit the knowledge stored in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS).

• The TaxaMiner Project
  We are investigating approaches to generate semi-automatically generate a taxonomy based on a combination of statistical clustering and NLP approaches. Initial experimentations shall be performed based on a subset of PubMed articles annotated by descriptors from a sub-tree of the MeSH taxonomy. The goal of the project is to automatically generate MeSH sub-tree. We propose to design evaluation measures on tree matching that can measure the goodness of these algorithms.

• Web Services for Bio-Medical Information
  Web Services is the latest initiative from the W3C for enhanced interoperability and extensibility via the use of XML. Simple web services can also be combined (possibly, on the fly) to implement complex operations. In this project we investigate approaches for enabling web service based access to the biomedical knowledge stored on the UMLS Knowledge Source Server. We will evaluate the benefits of Web Services vis-a-vis current implementations and approaches for creating complex biomedical services by combining simple web services.