The future of German MeSH: a new semi-automatic translation process and new services for search and annotation

Abstract

The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus is developed and supported by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Whereas the main purpose of MeSH is the indexing, cataloging and searching of biomedical literature, we foresee an increasing role in using this terminology for metadata annotation and concept search of research data. Since NLM terminated translation software and support in 2019, ZB MED has decided to take over. In this paper, we present the development of a new semi-automatic translation process in order to enrich MeSH with German terms. The developed software results in a web-based interface where curators can easily proof and edit the automatically translated terms. An additional view for the senior curator ensures quality control. The bilingual MeSH version is provided by ZB MED in various formats to enable easy reuse. Furthermore, it is included within a ZB MED hosted semantic lookup service (SemLookP). This service is well suited for concept search, providing concept information as well as retrieving subtree entries or equivalent concepts in other terminologies for search expansion via both web interface and API.

Keywords

• cataloging
• indexing
• translation
• fairdata
• metadata annotation
• terminology