Evaluation of Meta-1 for a Concept-based Approach to the Automated Indexing and Retrieval of Bibliographic and Full-text Databases

SAPHIRE is a concept-based approach to information retrieval in the biomedical domain. Indexing and retrieval are based on a concept-matching algorithm that processes free text to identify concepts and map them to their canonical form. This process requires a large vocabulary containing a breadth of medical concepts and a diversity of synonym forms, which is provided by the Meta-1 vocabulary from the Unified Medical Language System Project of the National Library of Medicine. This paper describes the use of Meta-1 in SAPHIRE and an evaluation of both entities in the context of an information retrieval study.