Mediating between nursing intervention terminology systems

The purpose of this study is to explore the use of formal systems as a way of mediating between diverse nursing intervention terminology systems. Existing approaches to mediation, such as the UMLS Metathesaurus, make heavy use of surface language. This compromises their capacity for managing similarities and differences between terminology systems. Within this study an initial ontology, derived from three existing terminology systems, was built using the GALEN approach. The ontology overcomes many of the barriers to effective mediation; it represents a rich integrated hierarchy that may be used to identify both direct and indirect mappings between concepts from diverse terminology systems. The approach used forms part of a formative, evolutionary development methodology in which potential mappings are validated and the results fed back into the next round of development.