Semantic Relations: Extending SNOMED CT and Solor.

Abstract

Terminologies, such as Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) and Solor, assist with knowledge representation and management, data integration, and triggering clinical decision support (CDS) rules. Semantic relations in these terminologies provide explicit meaning in compositional expressions, which assist with many of the above-listed activities.The aims of this research are to: (1) identify semantic relations that are not fully present in SNOMED CT and Solor and (2) use these identified semantic relations with terms that are currently present in SNOMED CT and Solor to form triples.We identified relations that were not fully present in either SNOMED CT or Solor and were important for VA Knowledge Artifacts (KNARTS). These terms and the relations were formed into triples. The relations, terms, classifications, and sentences were used to implement the relations in the High Definition-Natural Language Processing (HD-NLP) program.There are a total of 38 semantic relations. These had use cases built for each and were implemented in the Solor HD-NLP server for tagging of KNARTS.These new SNOMED CT and Solor semantic relations will give clinicians the ability to add more detail and meaning to their clinical notes. This can improve our ability to trigger CDS rules, leading to improved CDS provided to clinicians during patient care.