Semantic Web Research Group

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National Cancer Institute Thesaurus

The NCI Thesaurus is a public domain description logic-based terminology produced by the National Cancer Institute, distributed as a component of the NCI Center for Bioinformatics caCORE distribution[1]. It is deep and complex compared to most broad clinical vocabularies, implementing rich semantic interrelationships between the nodes of its taxonomies. The semantic relationships in the Thesaurus are intended to facilitate translational research and to support the bioinformatics infrastructure of the Institute. Topics described in the ontology include diseases, drugs, chemicals, diagnoses, genes, treatments, anatomy, organisms, and proteins.

The NCI Thesaurus evolved from the NCI Metathesaurus. NCI Metathesaurus is based on the National Library of Medicine Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. The NCI Metathesaurus has been operational since 1999. A public version is available at http://ncimeta.nci.nih.gov.

The current owl translation of the NCI Thesaurus is available here for download or online viewing. It contains just over 500,000 triples.

An archived version of the ontology hierarchy is viewable in HTML form. The annotation properties are not displayed in this hierarchy, but the structure and property restrictions are viewable.
The latest version of the NCI Ontology is available for download from the NCI website.
nciOncology.owl - This links to an archived, uncompressed version of the ontology that you can view in your browser. Warning: This file is ~32MB, and may take a very long time to download.
nciOncology.owl.gz - A archived, gzipped version of the same ontology, coming in at 3.4MB for a quick download.
Since the ontology is so large, many tools have trouble loading it. We recommend using Protege2 with the OWL Plugin to view the ontology. This loads relatively quickly on a PC, but not so well on a Mac.
If you have any problems viewing or parsing this ontology, please email Jen Golbeck: golbeck@cs.umd.edu. More information about this project and others is available at Jen's website. [an error occurred while processing this directive]