Deliverable 3.4: Medical terminology

This report outlines a methodology that addresses both conceptual and linguistic dimensions of terminology with the prime aim to enhance knowledge representation and promote informed communication within the medical domain, especially for the diseases under study in HEREDITARY.

Foundational to this initiative is an approach that merges terminological theory with practical application. The theoretical underpinnings emphasize the dual nature of 
terminology: it operates both as a conceptual structure that reflects domain knowledge and a linguistic system of specialized terms. This conceptual-linguistic synergy ensures terminological accuracy, consistency, and clarity, ultimately improving the quality of healthcare information transfer.

To demonstrate this dual-dimension approach we will go through an in-depth exploration of the gut-brain axis in existing biomedical terminological resources. The methods aim to illustrate how conceptual and linguistic structuring supports better domain understanding, corpus building, and expert engagement. Domain-corpus building and subsequent exploitation is a gateway to domain knowledge verbally expressed in texts written by experts. Hence, documenting the criteria, typologies, and metadata of gathered texts ensures a solid empirical foundation for terminology extraction. Various methods are presented for automatic and semi-automated term extraction. Tailored for the medical sector, these approaches address complexity and domain specificity, thus improving the precision and relevance of the extracted terms.

Validating the terminology to ensure both linguistic accuracy and conceptual integrity is a core activity. By clarifying roles, processes, and the importance of citizen engagement, this validation step ensures that the resulting terminology is both authoritative and accessible to various user communities.