Terminology, Ontology and their Implementations

This revised new edition containing numerous new and heavily updated chapters provides readers with the essential information needed to understand the central topics of terminology in healthcare, the understanding of which is an asset to be leveraged in care and research. Twenty-five years ago the notion that terminology should be concept-based was all but unknown in healthcare; now almost all important terminologies are at least partly concept-based. With no general model of what a terminology was or should be, there were no tools to support terminology development and maintenance. Steady progress since then has improved both terminology content and the technology and processes used to sustain that content. This new edition uses real world examples from the health sector to delineate the principal issues and solutions for the field of data representation. It includes a history of terminologies and in particular their use in healthcare, including inter-enterprise clinical and research data aggregation.

Terminology, Ontology and their Implementations covers the basis, authoring and use of ontologies and reference terminologies including the formalisms needed to use them safely. The editor and his team of carefully chosen contributors exhaustively reviews the field of concept-based indexing and provides readers with an understanding of natural language processing and its application to health terminologies. The book discusses terminology services and the architecture for terminological servers and consequently serves as the basis for study for all students of health informatics.




Dr. Elkin serves as UB Distinguished Professor and Chair of the UB Department of Biomedical Informatics. He is also a Professor of Medicine at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Peter L. Elkin has served as a tenured Professor of Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. In this capacity he was the Center Director of Biomedical Informatics, Vice-Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine and the Vice-President of Mount Sinai hospital for Biomedical and Translational Informatics. Dr. Elkin has published over 200 peer reviewed publications and book chapters. He received his Bachelors of Science from Union College and his M.D. from New York Medical College. He did his Internal Medicine residency at the Lahey Clinic and his NIH/NLM sponsored fellowship in Medical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Elkin has been working in Biomedical Informatics since 1981 and has been actively researching health data representation since 1987. He is the primary author of the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) national standard on Quality Indicators for Controlled Health Vocabularies ASTM E2087, which has also been approved by ISO TC 215 as a Technical Specification (TS17117). He has chaired Health and Human Service's HITSP Technical Committee on Population Health. Dr. Elkin served as the co-chair of the AHIC Transition Planning Group. Dr. Elkin is a Master of the American College of Physicians and a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Dr. Elkin chairs the International Medical Informatics Associations Working Group on Human Factors Engineering for Health Informatics. Dr. Elkin is the Editor of the Springer Informatics Textbook, Terminology and Terminological Systems. He was awarded the Mayo Department of Medicine's Laureate Award for 2005. Dr. Elkin is the index recipient of the Homer R. Warner award for outstanding contribution to the field of Medical Informatics.  He has been elected as a Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics.  He is a member of the ABPM Clinical Informatics Sub-Board and has been elected Co-Chair of the NCATS CTSA Informatics Enterprise Committee.  He also is the president elect of the Jacobs School's Faculty Council for 2022-3.