I would love to see the install be as simple as apt-get install to end up with 
some working dictionary that have more than a handful of entries to get them 
started.

Regards,
James Masanz

-----Original Message-----
From: andy mcmurry [mailto:mcmurry.a...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2014 4:32 PM
To: ctakes-...@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Recommendation for ctakes default (UMLS) dictionaries

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

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