Understanding the dialogue between users and formal terminology systems

In response to the increasing demands placed on existing nursing terminology systems, a number of authors have argued the need for formal terminology systems and significant advances have been made. Until recently the focus has been on using such systems as ’reference terminologies’. However more recently there has been a shift in emphasis with formal terminology systems being considered for direct use in clinical applications. This approach has profound implications both for the applications themselves and for their users; in the case of formal terminology systems it is no longer possible to ‘plug and play’. In this article the authors describe preliminary work that seeks to facilitate the implementation and direct use of formal terminology systems in clinical applications i.e. to support the dialogue between users and formal terminology systems, and use a range of techniques to: a) expose potential difficulties and b) contribute to the development of solutions.