Extracting a partition from a complex schema of a medical terminology

Controlled medical terminologies are increasingly becoming strategic components of various healthcare enterprises. However, the 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.