Extracting a partition from a complex schema of a medical terminology

Controlled medical terminologies are increasingly becoming strategic components of various healthcare enterprises. However, a typical medical terminology can be difficult to exploit due to its extensive size and high density. The schema of a medical terminology offered by an object-oriented database representation provides an abstract view of a terminology. Thus, the schema enhances terminology comprehensibility, presentation and usability. However, terminology schemas themselves can be large and unwieldy. In this paper, we present a methodology for partitioning a medical terminology schema into more manageably-sized fragments that promote increased comprehension. The application of our methodology to the schema of a large, existing medical terminology, called the Medical Entities Dictionary, is presented.