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MeSH©: from a Controlled Vocabulary to a Processable Resource

Large repositories of life science data in the form of domain-specific literature and large specialised textual collections increase on a daily basis to a level beyond the human mind can grasp and interpret. As the volume of data continues to increase, substantial support from new information technologies and computational techniques grounded in the mining paradigm is becoming apparent. These emerging technologies play a critical role in aiding research productivity, and they provide the means for reducing the workload for information access and decision support and for speeding up and enhancing the knowledge discovery process. In order to accomplish these higher level goals a fundamental and unavoidable starting point is the identification and mapping of terminology from unstructured data to biomedical knowledge sources and concept hierarchies. This paper provides a description of the work regarding terminology recognition using the Swedish MeSH© thesaurus and its corresponding English source. The various transformation and refinement steps applied to the original database tables into a fully-fledged processing-oriented annotating resource are explained. Particular attention has been given to a number of these steps in order to automatically map the extensive variability of lexical terms to structured MeSH© nodes. Issues on annotation and coverage are also discussed.