UMLS::Interface is a software package that is intended to provide an interface to the Unified Medical Language Systems (UMLS). It provides functions that will find basic information about concepts, and also find paths between concepts.

UMLS::Similarity is a software package that uses UMLS::Interface to find the semantic similarity and relatedness between medical concepts. Given two medical terms as input, the output will be a numeric score that indicates how similar or related the terms are. For example, if 'cold' and 'flu' are input, they would (probably) score more highly than 'cold' and 'fracture'.

This is an open source project, and our freely available code can be downloaded from CPAN. UMLS-Interface is available here and UMLS::Similarity is available here.

This mailing list is intended for users of these packages to post questions or suggestions about the package. It can also be used to discuss the underlying ideas behind the package, such as what are the best ways to measure semantic similarity and relatedness in the medical domain.