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Overview of NCI Thesaurus

The NCI Thesaurus, a biomedical thesaurus created to meet the needs of the NCI, is the NCI reference vocabulary that provides the concepts used in caCORE and caBIG to establish data semantics. A description of the semantics is included. In contrast the NCI Metathesaurus is intended to provide rich synonymy and is useful in mapping among the codes and terms used in various biomedical vocabularies.

NCI Thesaurus is registered in the HL7 OID Registry as 2.16.840.1.113883.3.26.1.1 .

NCI Thesaurus content comes from NCI, NCI-sponsored groups and an ongoing review of the open literature. The EVS project does not attempt to model aspects of biology or medicine that fall outside the National Cancer Institute's needs.

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. 

In addition to the NCI Metathesaurus and the NCI Thesaurus, the EVS/caCORE and LexEVS servers provide access to a variety of other vocabulary products such as SNOMED/CT, LOINC and VA/NDF.

Semantics of NCI Thesaurus (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.

Using the NCI Thesaurus Wiki

This is the wiki home page for the NCI Thesaurus. caCORE developers may edit this page and any user may add a comment.

Go the EVS Wiki Home Page

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