On Thursday, October 21, The University Libraries will co-sponsor a presentation in the Health Informatics Seminar Series. Dr. Alexa McCray, Director of the National Center for Biomedical Communication, a division of the National Library of Medicine, will be speaking on "Mapping the Gene Ontology into the Unified Medical Language System." The seminar will be held in room 2-101 Basic Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at 3:15.
Dr. McCray's research interests include medical language interpretation and processing, digital libraries, and consumer health informatics. The Unified Medical Language System is an automated language processing system for health sciences topics. Its applications include forming part of the query processing system for the PubMed bibliographic information search service. The Gene Ontology is another controlled vocabulary system being developed for the biomolecular sciences, an attempt to bring order to wide variations in terminology which may be applied by scientists to very similar genes, gene products, and functions.
Some of Dr. McCray's work on the topic was recently reported in: Lomax, J. and McCray, A. Mapping the Gene Ontology into the Unified Medical Language System. Comparative and Functional Genomics 5(4): 354-361 (2004). Dr. McCray's presentation is a part of the University Libraries' celebration of National Medical Libraries Month.