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Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS®)

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Rich Release Format Microsoft® Access Load Script

This document is a guide to loading an RRF subset of the UMLS Metathesaurus into an empty Microsoft Access (MS Access®) database by using the scripts and files created by MetamorphoSys. These operations must be performed on a machine running Microsoft Windows operating system with the MS Access database product installed.

To generate the necessary files and scripts, make the following selections when creating a subset with MetamorphoSys:

  • Select the MS Access database in the “Write Database Load Scripts” section of the "Output Options" tab.
  • Select the “Add Unicode BOM characters to output files” checkbox on the “Output Options” tab.
  • Select the adjacent “UTF-16LE” option from the “character encoding” pick-list.

The RRF subset of the UMLS Metathesaurus must be less than 2GB total size, as this is the upper limit to MS Access databases.

Configuring and Running the Load Script

  • Navigate to your output directory using the Windows explorer.
  • Open the umls.mdb file by double-clicking on it. This file is preloaded with a macro that will load the database.
  • Select "Modules".
  • Select the "ImportUMLS" module by double-clicking on it.
  • Run the "CreateUMLSSchema" macro. If applicable, enable macros (an online search for "MS Access enable macros" can help with this).
    • Any problems should result in an error being reported.
    • Ensure the total data set is < 2GB as this is an upper limit on the size of an MS Access database.
  • umls.mdb is now loaded and ready for use.

Sample Queries

At this point a fully loaded Microsoft® Access database containing a subset of the UMLS Metathesaurus should exist. This Access database comes pre-installed with a variety of queries. These queries should be parameterized, meaning that they can be run with various values for some of the lookup entries.