Building a Graph Representation of LOINC® to Facilitate its Alignment to French Terminologies.

The aim of our study was to create a graph model for the description of LOINC® concepts. The main objective of the constructed structure is to facilitate the alignment of French local terminologies to LOINC. The process consisted of automatically incorporating the naming rules of LOINC labels, based on punctuation. We implemented these rules and applied them to the French variants of LOINC and then created attributes and concepts described with synonymous labels. When comparing the created attributes to the stated ones, the multiple mappings led to the identification of errors that must be corrected for improving the translation quality. These mappings are consecutive to semantic errors generated during the translation process. They mainly corresponded to misinterpretations of LOINC concepts and/or LOINC attributes.