COVID term: a bilingual terminology for COVID-19

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Sizhu Wu¹  Zidu Xu¹  Qing Qian¹  Liu Shen¹  An Fang¹  Hetong Ma¹  Li Hou¹  Haixia Sun¹  Jiao Li¹ 

[1] Institute of Medical Information/Library, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences/Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China;

关键词: COVID-19;    Terminology system;    Bilingual;    Medical terminology;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12911-021-01593-9

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a pneumonia caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has shown its destructiveness with more than one million confirmed cases and dozens of thousands of death, which is highly contagious and still spreading globally. World-wide studies have been conducted aiming to understand the COVID-19 mechanism, transmission, clinical features, etc. A cross-language terminology of COVID-19 is essential for improving knowledge sharing and scientific discovery dissemination.MethodsWe developed a bilingual terminology of COVID-19 named COVID Term with mapping Chinese and English terms. The terminology was constructed as follows: (1) Classification schema design; (2) Concept representation model building; (3) Term source selection and term extraction; (4) Hierarchical structure construction; (5) Quality control (6) Web service. We built open access for the terminology, providing search, browse, and download services.ResultsThe proposed COVID Term include 10 categories: disease, anatomic site, clinical manifestation, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, living organism, qualifiers, psychological assistance, medical equipment, instruments and materials, epidemic prevention and control, diagnosis and treatment technique respectively. In total, COVID Terms covered 464 concepts with 724 Chinese terms and 887 English terms. All terms are openly available online (COVID Term URL: http://covidterm.imicams.ac.cn).ConclusionsCOVID Term is a bilingual terminology focused on COVID-19, the epidemic pneumonia with a high risk of infection around the world. It will provide updated bilingual terms of the disease to help health providers and medical professionals retrieve and exchange information and knowledge in multiple languages. COVID Term was released in machine-readable formats (e.g., XML and JSON), which would contribute to the information retrieval, machine translation and advanced intelligent techniques application.

【 授权许可】

CC BY