Controlled Health Thesaurus

"CDC’s Thesaurus is structured around preferred concepts, sourced whenever possible from standard vocabularies, with their associated properties (metadata) in a polyhierarchical framework. The preferred concept bacillus anthracis, for example, has defined associations to the concept Anthrax (the disease caused by the target organism) and to the concept Anthrax vaccines (the prevention for the disease). This organism term is 'treed' in the polyhierarchy as both a soilborne bacillus organism and as a biological agent. The parent concept Anthrax has child concepts Cutaneous anthrax, Gastrointestinal anthrax, and Pulmonary anthrax. Thus the utilization of this cluster of concepts on a website or within an application enables a rich retrieval of all anthrax-related information. (...) The Controlled Health Thesaurus is a public health view of pertinent concepts from the National Library of Medicine’s Metathesaurus. Additional concepts needed to cover the public health domain are being added and will be advanced to NLM. CDC Research revealed that the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) provided the broadest coverage of concepts for public health. Additional concepts from other UMLS vocabularies, such as the Computerized Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects (CRISP), Alcohol and Other Drug Thesaurus (AOD), and Library of Congress Subject Headings will be utilized as needed. CDC is leveraging the expertise of its subject matter experts and its public health partners to add additional public health concepts. Requirements for Thesaurus structuring and metadata selection came from the ANSI/NISO Z39.19 Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Thesauri. The standard deals with aspects of term selection and the means for establishing and displaying relationships between terms."