A combined onomasiological and semasiological approach to the development of a comprehensive interface terminology for information storage and retrieval in primary health care

An elaborated approach to creating a reference terminology has been developed. First, terms are selected from everyday interactions between doctors (occurrences in medical records, in guidelines), based on frequency count and relevance. Then an onomasological approach is applied to make a choice on basic concepts most intricately related to the most common sense of the selected terms. If possible a perfect concordance for that concept is looked for in the SNOMED nomenclature, and if not possible, in UMLS nomenclature, or genuinely defined. The nature of the mapping from the concept in the reference terminology to external international classification is qualitatively rated (exact, nearly exact, match to higher or lower level of granularity). In addition, each concept in the Reference Terminology (RT) is also mapped to classifications such as ICPC, ICD. Mapping to thesauri (MeSH) and other nomenclatures (LOINC, NANDA) is foreseen.