Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) - umls

Grade
The grade for the resource as automatically determined by the criteria violations.
1
Description
A full description of the resource from the resource itself, if possible.
The UMLS integrates and distributes key terminology, classification and coding standards, and associated resources to promote creation of more effective and interoperable biomedical information systems and services, including electronic health records.
Last curated
(Optional) The ISO 8601 date of when the resource was last curated.
2023-08-11
Location
URL for the resource.
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/
Source type
(Optional) How the resource relates to the data it contains. Current allowable entries are: "unknown", "repository", "source", "integrator", and "warehouse".
integrator
Curation status
Whether or not annotation is complete on this resource. Current allowable entries are: "complete", "incomplete", and "nonpublic".
complete
Field
The area of research for the resource.
biomedial
Type
The type of data the resource contains.
terminology
Categories
(Optional) Tags to describe the resource and its data.
standards
concept
ontology
Access
(Optional) Links to the resource's data.
None
License
The license that is used by the resource. We use SPDX where we can or: "inconsistent", "public domain", "unlicensed", "all rights reserved", or "custom".
custom
License type
The type of license that is being used. This will be to define compatible data pools in the future; we only use the grossest terms now. If it is not known "unknown" is used. Current possible values are: "unknown", "unlicensed", "copyleft", "permissive", "public domain", "copyright", "restrictive", or "private pool".
restrictive
License location
(Optional) The link to the resource license.
https://uts.nlm.nih.gov/uts/assets/LicenseAgreement.pdf
Focused curation
(Optional) Setting this flag to true indicates that the licensing was combinatorially complicated enough (as is the case in some commercial licenses) that the curator chose to wear a single "hat" during the process. From the site text: "While we try to cover as much of the licensing possibilities of a data resource that we can, in a few cases we may choose a particular "hat" to wear while evaluating to prevent a combinatorial explosion, which may also reduce the clarity of our curations for the community. In these cases, we may take on the role of a (1) non-commercial (2) academic (3) group that is (4) based in the US and trying to (5) create an aggregating resource, noting that other entities may have different results in the license commentary."
true
Issues
(Optional) Structured issues with the license. For every issue discovered with a resource, there should be a corresponding item in the license-issues field that marks the /exact/ violation, along with any comments. This field can be used by resources as the first step to improvement, as well as clarify any surrounding circumstances. Any issues or thoughts about a resource that do not slot into one of the criteria violations can go into the license-commentary field.
Criteria A.2.2: Non-standard/custom license.
Criteria B.1: One term of the license is that you must "[...]provide NLM with a brief report on the usefulness of the UMLS Metathesaurus in general[...]" (term 5); this rises to a barrier to reuse as a manual step invloving people has been added to use.
Criteria B.2.1: Violation occurs in section 11 "Some of the Material in the UMLS Metathesaurus is from copyrighted sources".
Criteria C.1: Was unable to be exavluated due to the terms of the license requiring agreeing to reporting before proceeding, producing a barrier to access.
Criteria C.2: Was unable to be exavluated due to the terms of the license requiring agreeing to reporting before proceeding, producing a barrier to access.
Criteria D.1.2: Various types of restrictions are given for various subsets/sources; for example, section 12.1 forbidding translation and derivative works.
Criteria E.1.1: "UMLS licenses are issued only to individuals and not to groups or organizations"; while an individual research may be able to get access and use, companies (for example) would not.
Commentary
(Optional) Further commentary on the license, possibly including the though process of the curations and things like locations of additional licenses.
• Could not access C categories as proceeding to access demanded signing up for giving reports: "[...]I will provide an annual report[...]", https://uts.nlm.nih.gov/uts/signUp
• "License hat" was required to be used as "UMLS licenses are issued only to individuals and not to groups or organizations[...]", https://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/umls.html
Controversial
(Optional) Marker noting that there was some extended internal discussion or controversy about the evaluation of the licensing terms. If this is marked at "true", the controversy, or a link to a permanent archive of the controversy, must be sufficiently contained in the "license-commentary" to reconstruct the issues.
false
Contacts
(Optional) Resource contact information, link, email, or whatever is public.
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/support.html
Grants
(Optional) Semi-structured list of supporting grants.
TBD

All copyrightable materials on this site are © 2019 the (Re)usable Data Project under the CC-BY 4.0 license.
The (Re)usable Data Project is funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) OT3 TR002019 as part of the Biomedical Data Translator project and U24TR002306 as part of the CTSA Program National Center for Data to Health (CD2H).
The (Re)usable Data Project would like to acknowledge the assistance of many more people than can be listed here. Please visit the about page for the full list.