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1

Using a web or ftp client go to the URL: ftp://ftp1.nci.nih.gov/pub/cacore/EVS/

2

Select the version of NCI Thesaurus OWL you wish to download. Save the file to a directory on your machine.

3

Extract the OWL file from the zip download and save in a directory on your machine. This directory will be referred to as NCI_THESAURUS_DIRECTORY

4

(Optional) Create Manifest and Preferences file.

Manifests control coding scheme metadata and can make adjustments to names and alternate names, versions and many other things that the source normally wants to say about the coding scheme.  This is very useful when the source itself does not supply this information, but the user needs to record it in the terminology service representation.  What follows is a sample manifest file used to update alternate names, language designations and versions.  Details of manifest elements are found in the Administration Guide to the manifest file.



Preference files control how data is loaded and while they don’t add anything to the source they can change the representation of a terminology, by making choices as to what is loaded as a property, entity or association from the source.  This preferences file sets root nodes for the terminology and  processes a set of complex properties not handled by the owl processor among other things.  The full preferences definitions are described in the Administration Guide to the preferences file.



<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="885ad5e4d94818d4-915e1cda-4a63473d-b360b46b-84b2e195289ad2c1b4ea66ec"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[Since the Thesaurus may be released as either a "by code" or "by name" formatted source,  preference files can serve the purpose of adjusting the entity code to it's intended place in LexEVS. Here are the differences in an OWL formatted Thesaurus source [file:
]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro>
]
A "By Code" formatted Thesaurus:



Which has it's entity code formatted as an rdf:ID. 

In the "by name" version (this in different version so the label and about do not quite match up) we have:


With the code found as a "<code>" tagged attribute of the class:



In this case we can insure that the value "C1324" will be loaded into LexEVS as an entity code by supplying a preferences file with the following values:
Loading this type of source without the preferences file may cause data truncation errors on the longer names and cause data loss on load.


Finally post processing is also available for this and other sources, but this is dealt with in the Administrative guide  post processor section and we won't revisit here.

5

Using the LexEVS command line utilities, load the NCI Thesaurus with no options.:

Change to the LexEVS home directory.