Healthc Inform Res.  2013 Dec;19(4):235-242. 10.4258/hir.2013.19.4.235.

From Concept Representations to Ontologies: A Paradigm Shift in Health Informatics?

• Schulz S
• Balkanyi L
• Cornet R
• Bodenreider O

• KMID: 2229498
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.4258/hir.2013.19.4.235

Abstract

OBJECTIVES
This work aims at uncovering challenges in biomedical knowledge representation research by providing an understanding of what was historically called "medical concept representation" and used as the name for a working group of the International Medical Informatics Association.
METHODS
Bibliometrics, text mining, and a social media survey compare the research done in this area between two periods, before and after 2000.
RESULTS
Both the opinion of socially active groups of researchers and the interpretation of bibliometric data since 1988 suggest that the focus of research has moved from "medical concept representation" to "medical ontologies".
CONCLUSIONS
It remains debatable whether the observed change amounts to a paradigm shift or whether it simply reflects changes in naming, following the natural evolution of ontology research and engineering activities in the 1990s. The availability of powerful tools to handle ontologies devoted to certain areas of biomedicine has not resulted in a large-scale breakthrough beyond advances in basic research.

Keyword

Data Mining; Terminology; Semantics; Vocabulary; Publishing

MeSH Terms

Bibliometrics
Data Mining
Informatics*
Medical Informatics
Semantics
Social Media
Vocabulary

Figure

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  Figure 1 Scopus time line analytics results for the exact phrase "medical concept representation".

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  Figure 2 Wordle tag cloud generated from result of catchphrase search using Ultimate Research Assistant [5].

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  Figure 3 Changes in the most frequent title words of papers on medical concept representation.

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