The aim of this article is to share our experiences from an international collaborative effort to study health outcomes among Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) soldiers following the 1991 Gulf War. By paying particular attention to distinct social and religious customs, geopolitical differences, and unique aspects of the health care system, we achieved a successful international collaboration...

thesaurus is one, out of many, precious tool in information technology by which information specialists can optimize storage and retrieval of documents in scientific databases and on the web. in recent years, there has been a shift from thesaurus to ontology by downgrading thesaurus in favor of ontology. it is because thesaurus cannot meet the needs of information management because it cannot c...

Automatic transformation of paper documents into electronic documents requires document segmentation at the first stage. However, some parameters restrictions such as variations in character font sizes, different text line spacing, and also not uniform document layout structures altogether have made it difficult to design a general-purpose document layout analysis algorithm for many years. Thus...

Many NLP applications need fundamental tools to convert the input text into appropriate form or format and extract the primary linguistic knowledge of words and sentences. These tools perform segmentation of text into sentences, words and phrases, checking and correcting the spellings, doing lexical and morphological analysis, POS tagging and so on. Persian is among languages with complex prepr...

The building of thesauri for large domains, especially for medicine, is a costly affair. However, in many domains thesauri can be constructed on an ontological basis [Wielinga , Schreiber, 2001]. We are developing an ontological information retrieval system for the retrieving of medical records from an electronic medical record system (EMR). We decided to use the UMLS as a basis for building th...

This paper presents solutions and lessons learned in the FinnONTO project carried out in Finland in 2003–2007. The paper focuses on three aspects of interoperability of digital collections. First, transforming thesauri to ontologies. Second, publishing ontologies for the use of indexers and content providers. Third, ontology based methods for improving the end user access to digital collections...

Ontology learning is the term used to encompass methods and techniques employed for the (semi-)automatic processing of knowledge resources that facilitate the acquisition of knowledge during ontology construction. This chapter focuses on ontology learning techniques using thesauri as input sources. Thesauri are one of the most promising sources for the creation of domain ontologies thanks to th...

In the information retrieval context, resource collections are frequently classified using thesauri. However, the limited semantics provided by thesauri restricts the collection search and browsing capabilities. This work focuses on improving these capabilities by transforming a set of resources indexed according to a thesaurus into a semantically tagged collection. The core mechanism for build...

Multilingual thesauri matching is a recent research topic concerning the application of the traditional schema matching algorithms in conjunction with the use of multilingual resources. In this paper, we present a multilingual matching approach aiming at defining matches between terms belonging to multilingual thesauri. The paper presents the approach as a variant of the schema matching problem...

Medical language processing depends on large-coverage, fine-grained specialized lexicons. The vast majority of existing electronic lexicons concern the English language; for other languages such as French, resources are scarce. In contrast, large medical thesauri exist in numerous languages, including French. Our goal was to study what kind of linguistic information could be extracted from thes...