An Entity-Relationship Model for a European Machine-Dictionary of Medicine.

Abstract Dictionaries, thesauri, nomenclatures are among the conventional tools for the systematic organization of terms and concepts of medicine. Computer support provides new functions for them, mainly because it allows for the co-existence in the same system of different views and approaches, until now in alternative. We analyze and model the general (language independent) features of both linguistic-terminological aspects and conceptual aspects of an integrated terminological data base of medicine. The special language of medicine is peculiar with respect to common language, particularly because of its high rate of synonyms and phrasal terms. We examine this peculiarity, analyzing the relationship between medical terms and underlying concepts. We build a continuous scale from the ’free’ text used by health operators in a given document to more and more regular and abstract forms (spelling variants, true synonyms, contextual variants, equivalent terms in different languages, morphosyntactical representatives, concepts).