Greetings ctakes-dev: *UMLS license restrictions have been getting more lax over the years -- *much of the UMLS can be downloaded directly from the NCBI official FTP site.
In fact, the NIH (and implicitly the NLM) *have already made the standard terms public for some medical specialities*. For example: Here is the UMLS subset specific to Medical Genetics (MedGen) and Genetic Testing (GTR) complete with SNOMED-CT concept CUI(s) and names, etc : [ ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/medgen/README.html ] My team has developed a JVM based wrapper for MetaMap 2013AB which I intend to open source soon (Clojure). It includes REST support for invoking MetaMap with any or all of the command line arguments. We do not integrate with UIMA, we are basically a wrapper around the binary installation of MetaMap. The emphasis is on publication text not clinical text, still, some services are common (such as LVG). Strangely, the NLM still requires UMLS licenses to download MetaMap execution binaries. The MetaMap binary install is better but customizing dictionaries (DataFileBuilder) is not as easy to use as CTAKES with YTEXT [ https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CTAKES/YTEX+Installation ] *** Hence, there is a real opportunity here to enable Apache cTAKES to have a stronger default dictionary. ** * Imagine if we could *$ apt-get install apache-ctakes * and instantly have a working package for SOME problem domain. In my case (Medical Genetics) the UMLS definitions are already available and the UMLS license problem becomes a non issue, at least for many first time users Your thoughts? AndyMC
