Can Wikipedia Be Used to Derive an Open Clinical Terminology?

Abstract

Clinical terminologies play an essential role in enabling semantic interoperability between medical records. However, existing terminologies have several issues that impact data quality, such as content gaps and slow updates. In this study we explore the suitability of existing, community-driven resources, specifically Wikipedia, as a potential source to bootstrap an open clinical terminology, in terms of content coverage. In order to establish the extent of the coverage, a team of expert clinical terminologists manually mapped a clinically-relevant subset of SNOMED CT to Wikipedia articles. The results show that approximately 80% of the concepts are covered by Wikipedia. Most concepts that do not have a direct match in Wikipedia are composable from multiple articles. These findings are encouraging and suggest that it should be possible to bootstrap an open clinical terminology from Wikipedia.