How is GALEN different from the UMLS?
The United States National Library of Medicine s Unified Medical Language System project has produced the Metathesaurus an extensive cross referencing of a large number of existing coding systems. The primary use of the Metathesaurus is to convert between coding systems. Conversion between coding systems is one important function of GALEN, but only one. For example, although the Metathesaurus cross references the codes in each system, it does not represent their meaning nor does it provide a means to extend the overall system. Only concepts which have been encountered before in one or another coding system can be dealt with. The UMLS also provides a semantic network which classifies each concepts into one of a number of categories.
The United States National Library of Medicine s Unified Medical Language System project has produced the Metathesaurus an extensive cross referencing of a large number of existing coding systems. The primary use of the Metathesaurus is to convert between coding systems. Conversion between coding systems is one important function of GALEN, but only one. For example, although the Metathesaurus cross references the codes in each system, it does not represent their meaning nor does it provide a means to extend the overall system. Only concepts which have been encountered before in one or another coding system can be dealt with. The UMLS also provides a semantic network which classifies each concepts into one of a number of categories. However, whereas the GALEN model provides taxonomies which contain thousands of categories in a complex hierarchy, the UMLS provides a relatively flat network of under 200 categories, roughly equivalent to the top-most layers of the GALEN hierarchies. UMLS a
