m-CD™: A hyperCard Interface to Meta-1 on a CD-Rom

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is being developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to provide uniform access to computer-based resources in biomedicine. For the foreseeable future, the foundation of the UMLS will be a metathesaurus of biomedical concepts, synthesized from existing biomedical nomenclatures and classification systems. META-1, the first version of the Metathesaurus, is available from the NLM on an experimental basis. It is being distributed on two CD-ROMs, one containing a HyperCard (implementation of META-1, called m-CD™. m-CD is a META-1 browser which will run on a 1MB or larger Apple Macintosh® computer equipped with a CD-ROM reader. Our demonstration of m-CD will assume no special knowledge of Macintoshes or META-1, and it will begin with receipt of META-1 “in the mail”. The demonstration will illustrate ways in which users and developers can use m-CD to explore the contents of META-1.