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There are a lot of (hierarchical) key systems available, e.g. the International Classification of<br />

Diseases and Causes of Death (ICD), Medical Subject Head<strong>in</strong>gs (MeSH), Systematized Nomenclature<br />

of Medic<strong>in</strong>e (SNOMED), and lots, lots more. In every application area there may<br />

be specific commonly used key systems. However, the real world does not always fit well <strong>in</strong>to<br />

tree like key systems, even if multidimensional stems sy are used.<br />

3.2.2 Conceptual Graphs<br />

In fact the world can be much better represented as a network (or should I call it web:-). That<br />

is the start<strong>in</strong>g po<strong>in</strong>t for conceptual graphs. Conceptual graphs [16-19] are a highly readable<br />

graphical language, with a great expressive power and can be easily mapped to and from natural<br />

language. They are an <strong>in</strong>tuitive knowledge representation language that graphically depicts<br />

relationships between concepts. A formalized description of the concept space, that conta<strong>in</strong>s<br />

concepts and relations, requires computer support <strong>in</strong> real applications because the complexity<br />

is big. Once a concept space has been developed computers are able to check the semantics of<br />

a statement and may reject statements that are not correct. This can be done e.g. by offer<strong>in</strong>g<br />

only terms for description which are allowed <strong>in</strong> the current context. A simple editor has been<br />

developed at the University of Hildesheim, the Concept Space Editor (CEPTER) [20], a more<br />

comprehensive system is developed <strong>in</strong> the Peirce project [17-19].<br />

One very complex application of conceptual graphs is the Unified Medical Language System<br />

(UMLS) [21] of the National Library of Medic<strong>in</strong>e (NLM). The so called Semantic Network<br />

conta<strong>in</strong>s 133 semantic types and 50 relations which l<strong>in</strong>k pairs of semantic types.<br />

4 WWW Interface<br />

When creat<strong>in</strong>g a (distributed) image<br />

database there are several choices for<br />

the front-end, which is not necessarily<br />

the WWW. If you have got a really<br />

distributed database sometime, you<br />

may be better off, not us<strong>in</strong>g the WWW.<br />

However, there are many good reasons<br />

consider<strong>in</strong>g the WWW as front-end,<br />

which <strong>in</strong> turn may be not the only one.<br />

The WWW gives much functionality<br />

for free, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g transparent network<br />

access, decompression of images,<br />

gradually display of images, hypertext/media,<br />

security mechanisms, and be<strong>in</strong>g<br />

able to reference the whole WWW. In<br />

the WWW many people have been<br />

th<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g about data types and develop<strong>in</strong>g<br />

viewers even for such data types<br />

Conceptual Graph<br />

is used for<br />

as virtual reality scenes. The Web uses the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which is<br />

somehow standardized and thus guarantees the usability of the generated resources for a long<br />

period of time. You do not have to care about different platforms. Even if you write code with<br />

ANSI C <strong>in</strong> a very portable manner there will be platforms which do not like this code. With the<br />

WWW you are f<strong>in</strong>e off, there are companies car<strong>in</strong>g for these problems. The data you offer is<br />

-12-<br />

is called<br />

Multil<strong>in</strong>gual generation<br />

Input support<br />

Description of structures<br />

is used by<br />

Semantic Network<br />

Concept mapp<strong>in</strong>g<br />

Artificial <strong>in</strong>telligence<br />

L<strong>in</strong>guistic<br />

Bus<strong>in</strong>ess adm<strong>in</strong>istration<br />

Medic<strong>in</strong>e<br />

Figure 2: Description of conceptual graphs us<strong>in</strong>g a<br />

conceptual graph.

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