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Overview of NCI Thesaurus (NCIt)

NCI Thesaurus (NCIt) (download) is NCI's reference terminology and ontology.   NCIt provides the responsive, science-based terminology concepts used in caCORE and caBIG to establish data semanticsNCI semantic infrastructure and information systems. It covers terminology for clinical care, translational and basic research, and public information and administrative activities. NCIt is also a widely recognized standard for biomedical coding and reference, used by a broad variety of public and private partners both nationally and internationally.

NCIt content comes from NCI, partners NIH, agencies and standards development organizations such as FDA and CDISC, caBIG and other groupspartners, user requests, and an ongoing review of the open literaturescientific literature (see EVS Use and Collaborations). This content is organized in a richly structured description logic environment, with more than 200900,000 relationships between concepts to help define and connect them.   Individual concepts include codes, terms, abbreviations, synonyms, definitions, links to outside sources, and a wide variety of other useful information.

More complete description of the semantics of NCIt is available. A document briefly describing the editorial policies governing change to NCIt content is included with the semantics information.

The NCI Thesaurus is updated monthly. The differences between one month's release and the next are summarized on the NCI EVS list server. API access to the complete history of every concept in the Thesaurus is supported in caCORE EVS 3.2 and EVS/caCORE 4.x. Real-time access to the complete history of every concept provides NCI Thesaurus users with the capability to deal with change over time due to the way that information is coded or classified, averaging roughly 700 new concepts and many additional changes with each release.  Complete change history for each concept is provided through EVS APIs and browsers. 

NCIt is registered in the HL7 OID Registry

NCIt is one component provides cross-links and semantics for a broader range of EVS terminology resources. The NCIt is the lead reference for the NCI Metathesaurus (NCIm), which provides rich synonymy and mappings among the codes and terms used in more than 70 100 biomedical terminologies.  EVS browsers and LexBIG/LexEVS servers provide access cross-links NCIt and NCIm to a wide variety of other terminologies and ontologies that are published separately, such as CTCAE, GO, ICD-910-CM, LOINC, MedDRA, SNOMED CT, and the VA's NDFMED-RT.

Semantics of NCIt

NCIt provides four features which together provide proven sufficient basis for the semantic integration of the caCORE. These four features are:

• Permanent, non-semantic concept codes
• NCI preferred terms for each concept
• English language definitions
• Synonyms

More complete description of the semantics of NCIt is available. A document briefly describing the editorial policies governing change to NCIt content is included with the semantics information.

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